The Annual Report Library Company of Philadelphia

THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA FOR THE YEAR 2011

PHILADELPHIA:

The Library Company of Philadelphia 1314 Locust Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107 2012 as of December 31, 2011 President B. Robert DeMento

Vice President Howell K. Rosenberg

Secretary Helen S. Weary

Treasurer Robert J. Christian

Trustees Harry S. Cherken, Jr. Martha Hamilton Morris Robert J. Christian Howell K. Rosenberg B. Robert DeMento Richard Wood Snowden Maude de Schauensee Carol E. Soltis Davida T. Deutsch Peter Stallybrass Beatrice W. B. Garvan John C. Tuten Autumn Adkins Graves Ignatius C. Wang Charles B. Landreth Helen S. Weary Gordon M. Marshall Clarence Wolf John F. Meigs

Trustees Emeriti Peter A. Benoliel Susan O. Montgomery Lois G. Brodsky Charles E. Rosenberg William H. Helfand William H. Scheide Roger S. Hillas Seymour I. Toll David W. Maxey Michael Zinman Elizabeth P. McLean

Director John C. Van Horne James N. Green Librarian Rachel A. D’Agostino Curator of Printed Books and Co-Director, Visual Culture Program Alfred Dallasta Chief of Maintenance and Security Erica Armstrong Dunbar Director, Program in African American History Ruth Hughes Chief Cataloger Cornelia S. King Chief of Reference Phillip S. Lapsansky Curator of African American History Cathy Matson Director, Program in Early American Economy and Society Erika Piola Associate Curator of Prints & Photographs and Co-Director, Visual Culture Program Jennifer W. Rosner Chief of Conservation Molly D. Roth Development Director Nicole Scalessa Information Technology Manager Sarah J. Weatherwax Curator of Prints & Photographs

Front Cover: William L. Breton. The Residence of Washington in High Street, 1795-6. Philadelphia, ca. 1828. Watercolor. Gift of Marshall Potamkin in memory of his mother Vivian Potamkin. See pp. 68-70. TABLE OF CONTENTS

REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT 4

REPORT OF THE TREASURER 8

REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR 10

REPORT OF THE LIBRARIAN 13

Health and Medicine in the Gifts of William H. 29 Helfand and Charles E. Rosenberg

African Americana 38

WOMEN’S HISTORY 45

Visual Culture: Historic Use of Images in 56 Commerce and Recreation

Report of the Print Department 63

SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION 74

APPRECIATION 88

THE JAMES RUSH SOCIETY 95

PUBLICATIONS 96 REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

In my first report as President, I am pleased to relate substantial accomplishments at the Library Company in 2011. Yet again, Trustees, shareholders, and friends showed extraordinary generosity in their support for this institution. We received a large number of valuable gifts of material, and none more so than the bequest from Robert L. McNeil, Jr., which included an unparalleled collection of early American maps. In the pages that follow, the Library Company’s esteemed curators will touch on the highlights of these gifts, so I will begin my report with financial and governance news. In 2011, we successfully met H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest’s $750,000 Chal- lenge Grant for the purchase of the Carriage House at 1319 Irving Street and raised 100% of the purchase price, paving the way for an expansion of the LCP “campus” and a much-needed increase of space for collections storage and operations. Also, through the good offices of Trustee Davida Deutsch, an anonymous donor made a gift of almost $2,350,000. The funds will support renovations to the Carriage House and create endowments for acquisitions in Women’s History and African American His- tory. Additionally, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, thanks to the good offices of Senator Dominic Pileggi, awarded the Library Company a capital grant of $1,000,000 to support much-needed renovations to the main library building. Finally, we received three gifts of $100,000 each to help fund necessary facilities upgrades from the McLean Contributionship, Trustee Emeritus William H. Scheide, and shareholders Nancy and Theodate Coates. In 2011, as well, a number of donors crossed the threshold of $100,000 in cumulative financial and in-kind gifts to the Library Com- pany and have been recognized with plaques at the entrance to the main building: The Abington Foundation, The Connelly Foundation, Kitty and Bob DeMento, Davida T. Deutsch, Beatrice W. B. Garvan, Howell K. Rosenberg, and Helen S. Weary. Last year was also busy in terms of Library Company governance. We welcomed six new Trustees to the Board: Nicholas D. Constan, Adjunct

4 Professor at the Wharton School of Business; John F. Meigs, Partner at Saul Ewing, LLP; Stephen P. Mullin, Senior Vice President and Princi- pal at Econsult Corporation; Maude de Schauensee, retired Fowler/van Santvoord Keeper of the Near Eastern Collections at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; Richard Wood Snowden, Manag- ing Director of Bowman Properties; and Clarence Wolf, Owner of the George S. MacManus Company. Many of these new additions to the board have long been members and supporters of the Library Company and we are delighted to have the benefit of their expertise and commit- ment on the Board of Trustees. We additionally congratulate John C. Tu- ten on his re-election to the Board for a second term. At the 2011 Annual Meeting, Beatrice Garvan stepped down as President of the Board after five years at the helm and passed the gavel to me. In honor of her distinguished service to the Library Company for more than a decade and of the longtime service of her late husband Tony Garvan prior to that, we established the Anthony N. B. and Beatrice W. B. Garvan Fellowship in Material Culture. Tony Garvan, a professor of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, was a member of the Library Company’s Board for thirty-six years and was President from 1986 until his death in 1992. Bea, a curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, carried on the family tradition, joining the Board in 1999 and assuming the presi- dency in 2006. Bea’s five-year tenure as the Board’s leader saw momentous accomplishments, including the acquisition of the Carriage House and the receipt of a major endowment gift from Robert L. McNeil, Jr., both of which will help ensure the Library Company’s continuing growth and vi- tality. Together Tony and Bea have made enormous contributions to the study of American Material Culture as well as to the Library Company itself, and the Garvan Fellowship is a fitting recognition at the conclu- sion of Bea’s term as President. Trustees and family members generously contributed $40,000 to permanently endow an annual month-long resi- dency for a scholar in this field. In 2011 also, recently enacted Trustee term limits first made their effects felt. While we are pleased to be conforming with best practices in nonprofit governance, we were sorry to see some old friends rotate off the board—and, in particular, friends who have performed heroic service to

5 the Library Company over many years. In recognition of their outstand- ing contributions, we are pleased to announce that Lois Brodsky, Beatrice Garvan, Gordon Marshall, and Carol Soltis have been named emeritus Trustees. Although I suggested at the beginning of my report that I would cede all the fun of talking about new acquisitions to the curators in the pages that follow, I do want to highlight some collection news that will not be discussed elsewhere. With the generous support of the Trustees, the Li- brary Company was able to acquire and conserve portraits of Zachariah and Susannah Knorr Poulson by the eminent painter James Peale (1749- 1831). Poulson was a devoted servant of the Library Company, acting as Librarian from 1785 until 1806, Treasurer from 1806 to 1812, and Director from 1812 to1844. We had been following these portraits for a number of years since they first went on the market and are delighted to have finally been able to bring the Poulsons home. The portraits are reproduced on page 12. In addition to extensive gifts from William H. Helfand, Charles E. Rosenberg, and Clarence Wolf, which will be discussed at length in the following pages, in 2011 we received a large collection of sheet music from an anonymous donor. Numbering hundreds of pieces, the works are principally representative of the 19th-century American canon. Many feature beautiful illustrations, such as Please Let My Brother Go, which depicts a young girl pleading in front of a judge for the release of her brother. From shareholders Todd and Sharon Pattison we received ninety- eight mid-19th-century works, all with bindings in a similar decorative style but unsigned. Pattison has attributed these to the Boston bookbinder Benjamin Bradley. All are subtly beautiful books and showcase the variety of binding styles that a single master could produce. Finally, last year we purchased a large engraved London broadside, Richard Whitworth’s Political Electricity; or An Historical & Prophetical Print in the Year 1770, containing thirty-one vignettes satirizing corrupt British policies and predicting economic ruin as a result. The vignettes include a man trying to paint over the “National Debt,” politicians “Play- ing at Cards with the Public Money,” and Benjamin Franklin flying a kite. By that time, Franklin had come to embody the experimenter-turned-re-

6 publican-revolutionary in British, American, and French text and visuals. In closing, I offer a brief glimpse back to 1731, when this institution was founded and Ben Franklin was a sprightly twenty-five years old. He had two offspring that year: a son named William Franklin, and an inspired model for a lending library that gave ordinary working people access to knowledge and culture. Given that William Franklin supported the British in the Revolutionary War, it’s clear which of those two babies did more to contribute to democracy in America.

B. Robert DeMento, President

C.A. White. Please Let My Brother Go. (Boston: White, Smith & Perry, ca. 1871). Gift of an anonymous donor.

7 REPORT OF THE TREASURER Year Ended December 31, 2011 Unrestricted REVENUES, GAINS, & OTHER SUPPORT Contributions $ 101,895 Dues 91,125 Grants 533,952 Interest & dividends 373,411 Realized gain on sales of marketable investment securities 291,796 Unrealized loss on marketable investment securities (422,883) Library Services 251,242 1,220,538

Net assets released from restrictions 2,619,822 TOTAL REVENUES, GAINS, & OTHER SUPPORT 3,840,360 EXPENSES Program 2,372,120 Management & general 434,237 Fundraising 159,186 TOTAL EXPENSES 2,965,543 CHANGE IN NET ASSETS 874,817 NET ASSETS, BEGINNING OF YEAR 8,947,191 NET ASSETS, END OF YEAR $ 9,822,008

8 Temporarily Restricted Permanently Restricted Total

$ 2,799,716 $ 587,960 $ 3,489,571 - - 91,125 500,000 - 1,033,952 - 408,514 781,925 - 319,175 610,971 - (462,592) (885,475) - - 251,242 3,299,716 853,057 5,373,311 (1,626,704) (993,118) - 1,673,012 (140,061) 5,373,311

- - 2,372,120 - - 434,237 - - 159,186 - - 2,965,543 1,673,012 (140,061) 2,407,768 703,524 21,840,696 31,491,411 $2,376,536 $21,700,635 $33,899,179

The complete financial statements, along with the report of our certified public accountants, are available at the Library Company.

Robert J. Christian, Treasurer

9 REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR

In 1969, Librarian Edwin Wolf 2nd mounted the exhibition Negro History: 1553-1903. The Library Company having begun collecting material relating to African American history long before it was a popular research topic, it was no surprise that we had remarkable holdings of relevant texts, prints, and ephemera. The appearance of this exhibition proved to be timely—both a reflection of a more inclusive academy and a spur to further research on the experience of people of African descent in early America. As Wolf wrote in the preface to the exhibition catalog, “Everybody is talking about Negro history, so we decided to do something about it.” One of the other things the Library Company did about it was to hire a young librarian named Phil Lapsansky to organize the African American collection and make it usable to scholars. Phil did that and much more, ultimately becoming a godfather to the burgeoning field of African American Studies, assisting countless young researchers with his encyclopedic knowledge of African American and Abolitionist publications. Phil’s efforts to establish the Library Company as an important center for this research were recognized in 2007 with generous seed funding from the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation to create the Program in Afri- can American History. After a successful pilot-project phase, we last year decided to make this initiative a permanent part of the Library Com- pany’s programmatic activities and appointed Erica Armstrong Dunbar as the Program’s first Director. Dr. Dunbar is an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware; she specializes in African American life and culture from 1619 to 1865. Her first book,A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (Yale University Press, 2008), is based in part on research she conducted as a Library Company Fellow in 1999-2000. We are genuinely excited to have a distinguished scholar with strong ties to this institution providing leadership for the Program in African American History. Further Program momentum built through an agreement with the

10 University of Georgia Press to co-publish its Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 book series. Dr. Dunbar will sit on the Advisory Board for the series. The first book to appear with the joint imprint of this new partnership will be Eva Sheppard Wolf ’s Almost Free: A Story about Fam- ily and Race in Antebellum Virginia (2012). We also institutionalized the collection strength and burgeoning research interest in graphics with the Visual Culture Program, inspired by Trustee William H. Helfand and co-directed by Associate Curator of Prints Erika Piola and Curator of Printed Books Rachel D’Agostino. Visual Culture promotes research use of prints, photographs, and book illustrations, as well as focusing attention on all visual aspects of printed materials, such as binding technology, typography, and printing techniques. In addition to formally expanding research and programming efforts through the Visual Culture and African American History programs, we created a more whimsical outlet for the creative doings of the staff with the “Beyond the Reading Room Blog.” Since November 2011, weekly contributions from staff, interns, and guests have covered out-of-the-way discoveries in the collections, unearthed the lost histories of Philadelphia landmarks, and described the process of creating original art work based on the collections—to describe just a few of the posts. Of course at the end of the day, world-class scholars and one-of-a- kind collections could do nothing for each other if we couldn’t keep the lights on. To that end, my role here involves me in frequent abrupt shifts between the sublime and the ridiculously necessary. Under the lat- ter heading, the exorbitant utility bills of recent years prompted us to take drastic measures to disconnect from the “City steam loop,” a system that used excess steam produced by the local electrical utility to heat city properties via a system of twenty-six miles of underground pipes. This was an efficient idea when it was developed in the 19th century, but as the years went by the costs of the City’s steam rose to almost three times that of producing our own on site. This past fall we undertook a conversion to in-house boilers for heat and humidification generation that should save an estimated $50,000 an- nually. The boilers are fired with natural gas, but they can use heating oil as a back-up in the case of a gas outage. The conversion involved tapping

11 into a high-pressure gas main at the end of our block, as well as hoisting the boilers and one of the oil tanks up to the eighth floor mechanical “penthouse” by means of a crane. We were thankful for patient neighbors during the several days of street closure! A series of needed upgrades to our main building at 1314 Locust Street is proceeding in tandem with the planning for the use of the recently acquired Carriage House on the street behind us and with more wide-ranging institutional planning as we prepare for the next phase of the Library Company’s long and distinguished history. I look forward to reporting on the accomplishments on both scores in the years ahead. John C. Van Horne The Edwin Wolf 2nd Director

Portraits of Zachariah and Susannah Knorr Poulson by James Peale, 1808. Oil on canvas. See page 6 for description.

12 Report of the Librarian

The McNeil Collection of Americana

Robert L. McNeil, Jr., who died in 2010 at the age of ninety-four, was renowned as a collector of Federal-era paintings and prints, especially the work of the Peale family. He was also widely known as a faithful and generous supporter of many Philadelphia area historical organizations, not only through his Barra Foundation but also in the form of personal dona- tions. Shortly after we acquired the Michael Zinman Collection in 2000 we had the memorable experience of opening a letter and finding a Barra Foundation grant of $1 million without our having formally submitted a grant application, and in 2009 Mr. McNeil wrote a personal check for $3 million to endow our Director’s chair. He was also famous among early American historians as the patron of the McNeil Center for Early Ameri- can Studies at Penn, which has become our most valued academic partner. Mr. McNeil’s collection of books, pamphlets, and maps relating to colonial and early national America, however, was not at all well known, and we were surprised and delighted to learn from his executors that he had left it to the Library Company. We were even more surprised by its size, and we were astounded by its quality. Mr. McNeil was a very dis- criminating collector. The nearly one hundred separate maps (which are described in the Print Department Report) are almost all fresh, brilliant impressions, many of them in rare states, and some beautifully hand-colored; but there are also a great many maps in the more than five hundred books we received, in dozens of volumes of travel and military history and in a mind-boggling flight of atlases. The McNeil Collection includes two issues of the first American atlas, published by Mathew Carey in 1795- 96, one of them unrecorded; Thomas Jefferys’American Atlas (London, 1775), the best atlas of Revolutionary America; and two copies, one brilliantly colored, of Henry Popple’s 20-sheet map of The British Empire in America (London, 1733), the first large-scale map of North America. We also received a copy of the first state of the first map of Philadelphia, Thomas Holme’sPortraiture of the City of Philadelphia, which was issued with Penn’s Letter to the Free Society of Traders (London, 1683). It is the

13 first graphic depiction of Philadelphia, meaning that a large gap in our collection is now happily filled. Other books in this magnificent collection filled gaps only slightly less glaring: three unrecorded Revolutionary-era imprints; eight Frank- lin imprints and four books written by him, including the Paris, 1795 edition of The Way to Wealth printed on vellum; the London, 1754 edition of Thomas Chippendale’s highly influential furniture pattern book, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director; the second issue of the first volume of theJournal of the Continental Congress (Philadelphia, 1774); the first French edition of Patrick Gass’sJournal of the Lewis and Clark expedition (Paris, 1810); Alexander von Humboldt’s massive folio Vues des Cordillères (Paris, 1810), with breathtaking color aquatint views of South American landscapes and color facsimiles of pre-Columbian codices; and the rare second issue of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems (London, 1773). These are just a few representative examples. Oh yes, and a copy of Weatherwise’s Town and Country Almanack for 1786 (Boston, 1785) with the woodcut of “General Washington’s Jack Ass,” said to be the gift of our ally the King of Spain. A great many books in the collection are famous, and it is not surprising that we already had copies, but in an amazing number of cases, there were important differences between them. For example, the McNeil copies of William P. C. Barton’s Vegetable Materia Medica and Flora of North America (Philadelphia, Carey, 1817 and 1821) have variant settings of type on many of the letterpress leaves and striking differences in the hand coloring. In our copy of Jacob Bigelow’s American Medical Botany (Bos- ton, 1817-20), the first American book with color-printed plates, some of the first plates are hand-colored; in the McNeil copy all of the plates are printed in color. The McNeil copy of Brissot de Warville’sCommerce of America (New York, 1795) is the thick paper issue, which is only evident by comparison with our thin paper issue. The errata at the end of the McNeil copy of the 1786 Paris edition of Jefferson’s Observations sur la Virginie are totally different from those in our edition. This list could go on and on. Moreover, many McNeil copies have interesting provenance, including signatures of Benjamin West, Rufus Griswold, Anthony Bene- zet, Charles Carroll, John Jay Chapman, William Rush, James Biddle, and James Monroe; and others have manuscript annotations, including

14 one volume glossed by Peter Collinson. A great many of the plates and maps in the McNeil books are in variant states or impressions. There are just so many ways that two copies of a book that appear to be the same can be different, and different in important ways. The first thing we noticed about Mr. McNeil’s collection, before we got into searching our holdings and comparing copies, was the superla- tive condition of all the books. Mr. McNeil collected famous and important books, and these are precisely the ones that were most intensively used here in the days when we were a lending library. Many of our most important books are either decrepit or sadly over-restored. Therefore we were delighted when Mr. McNeil’s executors decided that we could retain ostensible duplicates when the McNeil copy was in superior condition in ways that would make them useful for research. If our copy of a book is in an original binding, we do not rebind it, even if the binding is shattered. A second copy that has been rebound and can be used without risk of damage is thus a valuable addition to the collection. And con- versely, where the McNeil copy is in the original binding, as so many are, it is worth adding to the collection for the historical evidence the binding can provide. What evidence can a binding provide? We will close our account of this magnificent bequest with an example. The Library Company’s copy of the The Federalist, the famous series of essays in support of the Con- stitution by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (New York, J. & A. M’Lean, 1788), was bound or rebound shortly after publication in a plain binding that is now shattered with overuse. The McNeil copy is in the original blue paper-covered boards, which are clean and bright; and the paper is unpressed and untrimmed, which is why it is over an inch taller than ours. The McNeil copy is a beautiful book and an amazing survival; but its material form can also tell us a lot about the circulation and reception of this iconic book. The eighty-fourFederalist essays began to appear in New York City newspapers in October 1787, shortly after the close of the Constitutional Convention. For a few weeks they were widely reprinted in other newspapers, but by the time the series ended in April 1788, no newspaper outside New York City was carrying it, with good reason: eight states had already ratified the Constitution. Only in New York and Virginia

15 was opposition serious, and there the ratification conventions had not yet met. This re-publication in book form, far from being a response to overwhelming demand, was a last-ditch effort to build support for the Constitution in those states, especially in Virginia where only the first six numbers had appeared in print. Hamilton paid for more than half the cost of printing and had many of the five hundred copies hurriedly sent in large batches to Virginia and Albany, New York. We have found no indication that the publication was advertised outside New York, or that it was sold by any bookseller other than the printer. The two volumes were published almost three months apart, in March and May, and they were distributed separately. This is probably why the McNeil copy (like many other copies) is not a matched set. Volume one was inscribed by John J. Van Rensselaer (born ca. 1760), an obscure member of that large upstate New York clan; but volume two has no provenance at all apart from a mysterious ink stamp reading, “Sold by order of Directors, Sept. 19, 1924.” (It is also five-eighths of an inch taller than its mate.) All this evidence would have been lost if the volumes had been rebound. But what does it mean? One likely scenario is that volume one was in the batch of sixty sent to the Federalist patroon Stephen Van Rens- selaer in Albany on April 10, 1788 (cf. The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 13:491). The delegates to the New York ratification convention were soon to be elected, and undoubtedly Ham- ilton hoped the books would influence the process. But the McNeil copy did not serve this purpose, because evidently Stephen gave it to his kins- man John, and neither of them was elected a delegate. Going into the convention forty-six of the sixty-five delegates were Antifederalist, according to historian Gordon Lloyd. Shortly after they convened, with Hamilton and Jay among them, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, and the Constitution became law–but only among the ratify- ing states. Now the question was whether or on what terms New York would join the Union. Debate continued furiously for another month. In the end the Convention voted to ratify the Constitution, but only with a twenty-five-point Bill of Rights and thirty-one amendments attached, with a call for a national convention to adopt them. The margin was 30- 27, with eight Antifederalists abstaining. Their abstention averted a crisis but lodged a dramatic protest against the Constitution as it then stood.

16 The McNeil copy ofThe Federalist also proves that the first edition never did sell out completely. According to the printer, “several hundred copies” remained unsold in October 1788. In May 1789 he announced that “a few Copies are yet remaining for Sale,” and that he had added to them the text of the Constitution. The McNeil copy has that addition, meaning that it was still unsold at that point. In 1799 still more unsold copies were reissued with new title pages. That may have exhausted the complete sets, but there were still unmatched second volumes in the warehouse, at least one of which, the McNeil copy, did not see the light of day until 1924. The reputation ofThe Federalist grew enormously over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, but the evidence provided by the McNeil copy supports the argument that when it first appeared it was hardly known outside New York, and even there it failed to change the minds of most of the Constitution’s leading opponents.

Frankliniana

The sale of much of Stuart Karu’s Frankliniana collection at Christie’s in May presented many now-or-never opportunities, and happily the Li- brary Company was able to rise to the occasion. We acquired the lovely portrait of Franklin that appeared on the cover of the catalog, a color aquatint after Duplessis printed in Paris by Jean François Janinet in 1789; the earliest American example of printing on vellum–that we know of (a deed form from the press of Franklin and Hall, 1753); an issue of the Journal de Paris (April 1784) containing the first appearance of Frank- lin’s prescient essay on daylight savings time (purchased with funds provided by Davida Deutsch); a book from Franklin’s library, John Dryden’s sensationally bloody Oedipus: A Tragedy (London, 1735), which passed down in his family until 1947; and a truly extraordinary 28-by-17 inch engraved satirical print titled Political Electricity, published in London in about 1770. This last item requires some explanation. Why this satirical print would interest the preeminent living collector of Frankliniana is not apparent at first glance. In thirty-one compart- mented scenes it harshly satirizes a number of British politicians whose corrupt actions are seen to be injuring not only Britain but also her American colonies. The scenes are all linked by a looping line or chain

17 Veridicus (i.e., Richard Whitworth), Political Electricity; or, An Historical & Prophetical Print in the Year 1770 (London, 1770). Engraving.

18 that appears to originate from a strange tiny figure at the top right, a human body with a crank where its head should be and some kind of tube protruding from below its belt, with a key hanging from it. Given the title of the print, there is just barely enough visual information here to suggest that the figure is a hybrid of a politician and an electrical generator, and that the chain is conducting electricity. But who is the politician? There is no hint in the design. Only in the fine print of the caption at the bottom of the sheet are we told that hybrid figure is meant to represent Lord Bute, a prime example of a corrupt British politician, “in the Character of Doctor Franklin his Body the Electrical Machine.” In other words, Franklin is actually the most important character in the print, the source of the energy that is wreaking various kinds of havoc throughout, and the creator of its visual and political language; but you’d never know it just by looking at the design.

Details from Political Electricity, upper right and lower left.

19 Perhaps to remedy that difficulty, the artist later added a figure close to the machine, a tiny man flying a kite, with the string intersecting the chain that carries the current to all the other compartments. The print we have just acquired is this second state, with the kite flyer. The man is still not identified, but evidently as early as 1770 the image of a man flying a kite with a key somewhere nearby (but no lightning) was sufficient to de- note Benjamin Franklin to an English viewer. This could not possibly be the first representation of Franklin and his kite, but so far we have failed to find an earlier one. This alone makes the print interesting to us, but the entire composition is rich in meaning. In fact our former fellow James Delbourgo devoted several pages to it in his book A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2006), as well as writing an article about it in the Octo- ber 2004 issue of the online history journal Common-place.org. That in- cited a strong desire to own a copy of this very rare print, and now we do. In last year’s report we described Clarence Wolf ’s donation of a collection of bills of lading printed by Franklin and Hall that had been filled out and signed by the Philadelphia merchant William Hartshorne, and this year he gave another printed blank that also has a Franklin connec- tion. It is a form granting permission to leave the island of Antigua that was filled out and signed by the Governor, George Thomas, in February 1765. Thomas’s name appears on the form in type as well. So who printed it, and where? The first printer on the island was Thomas Smith, who was sent there with a press and type by Franklin in 1748, but he could not have printed this form because he died of fever in 1752, before Governor Thomas took up his office. Franklin quickly sent a replacement, his own nephew Benjamin Mecom, the son of his beloved sister Jane. Mecom hated Antigua and moved back to Boston in 1756, but before he left he could easily have printed enough of these unusual forms to last Thomas for many years. The other possibility is that Thomas had the forms printed in London. Type answers the question. The form has a large distinctive swash italic T with the right crossbar cut off. This same sort also appears on the title page of the only extant book printed by Thomas Smith, the 1749 Occasional Poems by William Shervington; and it also appears in the first book printed on the island after Mecom left, a 1766 book of laws printed by his successor Thomas Shipton. We cannot find this piece

20 of type on any of Mecom’s Antigua printing, but then there are just two known examples, a small grammar book and a single issue of his Antigua Gazette. It makes sense, though, that Franklin’s type stayed on the island and was used by all three of these printers, and that our blank form is therefore the third surviving piece of Benjamin Mecom’s Antigua printing.

More Fruits of Philosophy

In 2005, Charles E. Rosenberg helped us acquire the New York, 1832 first edition of Charles Knowlton’sFruits of Philosophy, the first extensive description of contraceptive techniques. This year he gave us a copy of the third edition, Boston, 1834, and the fourth edition, Philadelphia, 1839. According to the popular medicine collector Edward At- water, the second edition was twice as big as the first, with much new information on contraceptive techniques; the third edition is nearly identical to the second, but the fourth edition was completely rewritten. That was the last edition authorized by Knowlton, and the basis of the reprints read by modern historians of birth control, perhaps without realizing it is two big steps removed from what Knowlton originally wrote. Knowlton’s little book (and it was little; the first edition was less than three inches tall!) aroused plenty of controversy, not simply for its advocacy of Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Adult People. Fourth birth control, but because the Edition, with Additions (Philadelphia, 1839). method he recommended, post- Gift of Charles E. Rosenberg. coital vaginal douching, put

21 control of conception into the hands of women. It also included elaborate and explicit descriptions of the physiology of sex. He was prosecuted three times for obscenity and served a three-month jail term. The publisher of the second and third editions, Abner Kneeland, was prosecuted for blasphemy. The circulation of the first three editions was limited by Knowlton because he wanted to make sure his methods worked. Those editions are now incredibly rare. He meant the fourth edition to be cir- culated more widely, and it is somewhat more common, but there were no other surviving American editions for almost forty years. It looked as if the suppression of the book was successful at last. But in the meantime it had migrated to England, and that is where it had its first real impact. The first London edition appeared in 1834, apparently a verbatim copy of the second American. It was kept in print in England from the 1830s to the 1870s without interference, selling only about a thousand copies a year, mostly to dyed-in-the-wool freethinkers. Then in 1876 a man from Bristol interleaved a copy with obscene pictures, and the publisher was prosecuted. He got off easily by pleading guilty, but that left open the question of whether the book could still be sold freely. The leading freethinkers Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh decided that a test case was needed. They organized the Freethought Publishing Company, printed an edition, told the police when and where it was to be distributed, and were duly arrested and tried. It is said that 20,000 people gathered each day to follow the trial, which ended in acquittal. As a result of this sensation, sales of their edition surged to over 50,000 copies a year, and contraception became for the first time a subject of public discussion and general knowledge. In early 2012, as this report was being written, Dr. Rosenberg’s good friend and fellow popular medicine collector William H. Helfand gave us a copy of what must be one of the last London editions before the Bradlaugh-Besant trial. It is undated, but the printer, Austin & Co., was the printer of Bradlaugh’s journal The National Reformer. It is stitched in a plain brown wrapper, and the plates from which it was printed are so worn they are illegible in places. As rare as the first American editions are, this one is unique and seems to be the only copy to have survived from among all the English editions of the 1860s and 1870s. It appears to be the same text that had been circulating there all along, based on the

22 second American edition. Besant and Bradlaugh followed it with slight modifications, probably unaware that Knowlton had completely rewritten it. So now we have Knowlton’s little book in all its various forms, his original version, his revised version, his final version, and the English version that had the greatest impact. Just what was that impact? Elizabeth Kolbert put it very well in an article in the April 9, 2012, New Yorker: “‘Fruits of Philosophy’ has been credited, as much as any pamphlet can be, with changing the course of history. Right around the time it first appeared, fertility rates in the U.S. began to plummet, and, in the decades after Besant and Bradlaugh’s trial, British birth rates followed a similar trajectory. Though it can be difficult to tease out the causes of broad demographic trends, Knowlton’s work was instrumental in spreading what one historian has called ‘the good news that sex and procreation could be separated.’”

Other Gifts

No one has a better eye for unusual books than Roger Stoddard, and a gift he made this year includes several worth special mention. One is a copy of the Nahum Brady and Nicholas Tate metrical Psalms (Boston, J. Draper for J. Edwards, 1754) that was customized strangely. It is complete as published, with a selection of thirty of Isaac Watts’s Hymns at the end, but someone bound with it a much fuller selection of one hundred and three Watts Hymns, taken from another Psalter. Hundreds of Psalters were published in 18th-century America, so figuring out which edition these pages are from might have been difficult if the binder of this volume had not included a leaf of publisher’s advertisements for the bookseller David West. That allowed us to determine that the extra Hymns are pages 277 to 358 of an otherwise similar edition of the Brady and Tate Psalms printed in Boston by Joseph Bumstead for West and Larkin in 1790. The binding is black morocco with gilt edges and elegantly applied gold tools. Laid in it is a 1970 letter to Mr. Stoddard from the eminent bookbinding historian Hannah French, linking one of the distinctive gilt rolls on the covers with the shop of Henry Bilson Legge, who she says bound many books for Isaiah Thomas in the 1790s. David West was one of a group of Boston booksellers with whom Thomas frequently worked. So it looks

23 as though the owner (perhaps the Boston merchant Henry Bromfield, 1727-1820, who inscribed the title page) decided he would rather have the full complement of Watts’s Hymns in his Psalter; but rather than simply replacing it with a newer edition, he had the old one rebound with part of a newer one sometime after 1790. It is an odd but plausible scenario, but another fact complicates it: the American Antiquarian Society has three copies of the 1754 Psalter all modified in a similar way but with Hymns from different editions. It seems that improving this edition was not the whim of one eccentric old man, but a normal thing to do. But why? It is a mystery we hope one of our readers can solve. There is another presumed Legge binding in Mr. Stoddard’s gift, and once again, it is on a puzzling book. This one is a copy of the quarto family Bible published by Mathew Carey on October 27, 1802, bound in red morocco with elaborate tools and rolls, including the same roll that Hannah French ascribed to Legge. We have another copy of this Bible with the same imprint date, but when we compared the two we were very surprised to find that they are really two different editions, and the Stod- dard copy used the old-fashioned long s throughout, the one that looks a bit like an f, whereas our copy uses the new round s. Because Carey never again used the long s in his family Bibles, it is possible that the Stoddard copy is the earlier edition, but it is also possible that the two editions were printed more or less concurrently by different printers with different sorts of type, possibly in response to unexpectedly strong demand. The list of some 3,700 subscribers suggests an edition size that would have stretched the capacity of any printer. Indeed Carey’s correspondence is filled with complaints from booksellers who had not received their Bibles long after the day of publication. Or the second edition could be “the coarse edition which you have just published,” referred to in a letter to Carey from Boston bookseller Ebenezer Andrews from November 27, 1802. Certainly the paper in our round s edition is much browner than that in the Stoddard copy. This is all just speculation, but one thing is certain: Legge bound the Stoddard copy in the highest Boston style, in full red morocco with an elaborately gold-tooled spine and gilt edges, for the very wealthy Benjamin Pickman, the son-in-law of Elias Hasket Derby (1739-1799), the first Salem, Massachusetts, China trader. Pickman’s book plate and his family records confirm this. Here-

24 tofore Carey’s Bibles had come in Quakerly brown calf, but soon he too began to offer a deluxe morocco option in part to cater to this emerging merchant class. From David Doret, we received an advertising handbill for the novel Life and Adventures of Charles Anderson Chester, the Notorious Leader of the Philadelphia “Killers” (Philadelphia, 1850), the first of three novels that George Lippard based on the election night race riots that occurred in the Moyamensing district of South Philadelphia on October 10, 1849. Lippard evidently began to write his account of the riots almost before the smoke had cleared and the bodies were buried. Comparing newspaper accounts with his, it is clear that he mixed fictional characters and events with factual ones. The Killers were a notorious (and real) gang of Irish-American volunteer firemen, who provoked a riot by torching a tavern in an African American neighborhood at Sixth and St. Mary’s streets. The handbill includes a woodcut showing an African American man firing a pistol at a white fireman as the tavern burns and the brickbats fly. We have the only known copy of the novel, actually a thirty-six-page

George Lippard, Just Published . . . The “Killers.” (Philadelphia, 1849). Woodcut. Gift of David Doret.

25 pamphlet, and that woodcut appears as the frontispiece and on the back wrapper. On December 1, 1849, Lippard began to serialize another novel based on the riot in his newspaper The Quaker City Weekly, under the title The Killers. It repeated many passages from Charles Anderson Chester but disguised the repetitions with a whole new set of character names and several new plot lines as well. The Killers was reprinted directly from the newspaper type in pamphlet form, two columns to the page, in 1850, and it was reissued the following year retitled The Bank Director’s Son. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has the only known copies of those two pamphlet novels. Lippard published the three slightly different novels in rapid succes- sion to maximize his return from the sensation, but also to reach different audiences. Judging from the language of our newly acquired handbill, Charles Anderson Chester was meant to be taken as non-fiction. “This is no work of fiction, it is a true history from real life. It is full of instruc- tion for the old, and pregnant with warning to the young.” It aspires to the true crime genre. The Killers, with its added plot lines (including an opening scene set at Yale in 1846) was more obviously fictional. Its newspaper incarnation was local and ephemeral, while the pamphlet version was published by an otherwise unknown firm and probably also meant for local consumption. The Bank Director’s Son was published by E. E. Barclay, one of America’s leading publishers of pulp fiction, with branch- es in New York, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. This third and last version makes a bid for a national audience. There is no mention of the riots, by then old news, on the title page. Instead it highlights a sensational but incidental subplot involving an innocent bystander: “containing an authentic account of the wonderful escape of the beautiful Kate Wilson, from a flaming building in the city of Philadelphia.” Lippard even put his name on the title page for the first time. Even more horrific riots convulsed Philadelphia in 1844. These were Nativist anti-Catholic riots, and they created a much larger body of printed controversy. Antiquarian bookseller Donald Mott gave us a copy of The Truth Unveiled, or, A Calm and Impartial Exposition of the Origin and Immediate Cause of the Terrible Riots in Philadelphia, on May 6th, 7th, and 8th, A.D. 1844, by A Protestant and Native Philadelphian (Phil- adelphia, 1844), inscribed by John McAllister, whose giant collection of

26 Civil War-era ephemera we received in the 1880s. The collection was recently cataloged with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was featured in our Sesquicentennial exhibition, “John A. McAllister’s Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front.” McAl- lister inked over parts of the title of his copy and inserted text so that it reads, The Truth Veiled; or, A False and Partial Exposition of the Origin . . . By a Popish Foreigner whose Priest permits him to assume and without sin for the good of Holy Mother the deceptive signature of A Protestant and Native Philadelphian. Beneath the imprint, he wrote that the printer M. Fithian was also the publisher of the Roman Catholic Herald. There is no doubt where McAllister’s sympathies lay in this murderous conflict, but it is astonishing to see how violent a partisan he was. From Todd and Sharon Pattison we received ninety-eight mid-19th- century works, all bound in a similar decorative style but with bindings unsigned. Pattison has attributed all of these to the Boston bookbinder Benjamin Bradley. Due to Bradley’s great skill, these are subtly beautiful books and showcase the variety of binding styles that one master could produce, while also, by their number, demonstrating Bradley’s impressive productivity. From Davida Deutsch came two wonderful end-of-year gifts. One is a silk ribbon commemorat- ing, and likely worn at, the funeral procession for General Lafayette that took place in Philadelphia on July 21, 1834. The other is a set of American-made playing cards, the “Steamboats” deck (New York, ca. 1850). This full set of 52 cards, with a blue snowflake design on their backs, comes to us framed, accompanied by their original The Truth Unveiled (Philadelphia, 1844). wrapper, and the brilliantly col- Gift of Donald Mott. ored face cards appear not to have

27 faded at all since their manufacture. Finally, a gift that is not a book, but rather more of a relic. Through shareholder Susan Lea came a gift from her mother Carolyn Lea in honor of her late husband Francis Carey Lea, Jr., of Mathew Carey’s gold pocket watch, which is about two inches in diameter and one-half inch thick; it has a white dial with Roman numerals and gold hands. The back plate is marked, “R. Roskell Liverpool 6015,” which places the date of manufacture to about 1810. The key accompanies the watch, which passed from Mathew Carey to Isaac Lea to Mathew Carey Lea (or perhaps directly to Mathew Carey Lea who was sixteen at the time of Mathew Carey’s death) to Van Antwerp Lea to Francis C. Lea, Jr. We were able to display the watch at a recent conference honoring Carey (1760-1839) as the leading book publisher of his time and also one of the most important proponents of the then-dominant nationalist school of economic thought. This watch joins other gifts from Carey’s descendants, including his portrait by John Neagle, his toddy glass, and a huge number of his books and papers. It was a valuable possession of Carey’s and is a symbol of his character, as well as a beautiful object in its own right.

James N. Green, Librarian

28 Health and Medicine in the Gifts of William H. Helfand and Charles E. Rosenberg

Two thousand eleven was a remarkable year for the acquisition of medical works, both regarding institutional medical practice and popular medicine. Largely to thank for the tremendous influx are two donors well-known to readers of these reports: Trustees Charles E. Rosenberg and William H. Helfand. Mr. Helfand gave more than fifteen hundred items from his popular medicine and pharmaceutical history collection, adding to his previous gifts of thousands of related items given during the last two decades. Mr. Helfand’s 2011 gift includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, as well as a substantial amount of ephemera such as in- voices, billheads, and circulars. Most works in the gift are American and date from the mid- to late-19th century, though these are joined by several significant European imprints and by materials from the 18th and 20th centuries. The gift includes several Parisian imprints on venereal disease from the late-18th century, and two editions of William Brodum’s Guide to Old Age, or, A Cure for the Indiscretions of Youth (both London, 1802). In his Guide, Brodum addresses a great many of the usual ailments of age (gout, palsy, jaundice), but also devotes several chapters to the ill effects of dubious romantic encounters. A favorite title appears multiple times in Mr. Helfand’s gift: six editions of The Works of Aristotle, including his Masterpiece, the enormously popular guide for midwives and ostensible sex and reproductive health guide for men and women. The editions span the 19th century. The earliest includes the usual explanation of the causes of monstrous offspring, being the result of “divine” judgment or of “natural” perversions of the parents. The later editions, from the last quarter of the century, include the same descriptions and depictions of monsters found in the earlier editions, but lack the same explanation as to their cause. The reader of even these late editions can still find, however, in the question-and-answer portion of the work commonly called “Aristotle’s Book of Problems,” a brief explanation of the effect of the mother’s thoughts during copulation upon the child conceived, said even to determine skin color. Our collection of these works now numbers more than sixty volumes, making it one

29 of the strongest in any institution. While the materials in this gift include many works on women’s reproductive health and birth control, the overarching theme of the collection is the restoration of men’s health, sexual well-being in particular. The gift includes hundreds of pamphlets and pieces of ephemera produced by patent medicine purveyors. Among these are publications from Dr. Ray Vaughn Pierce’s hugely successful World’s Dispensary Medical Asso- ciation, including two copies of a medical questionnaire, or “Application for Treatment” (Buffalo, ca. 1890s), one intended for ladies and one for gentlemen. The differences between the two are quite thought-provok- ing. Whereas men are asked which venereal diseases they have already been treated for, and which venereal disease symptoms they are currently experiencing, women are asked about their penchant for “self-abuse” and “polluting dreams.” Despite the apparent greater risk of disease in men, women are not asked about their husbands’ health, though men are asked about the health of their wives. One of the popular medicines advertised in this collection is Pabst’s Okay Specific, or, more specifically, Pabst’s Okay Diuretic. Two small posters (ca. 1910-1915) with the same dimensions, one on stiff paper and one on metal, advertise the preparation. The paper sign explains that Pabst’s is “posi- tively and without fail” a cure for gonorrhea. The metal sign (illustrated here) has almost the exact same text as the paper one except that any mention of venereal disease is notably absent. In blue and gold, the metal sign is quite lovely and perhaps was destined for a You Know Pabst’s Okay Diuretic (Chicago: more public area than the more Pabst Chemical Co., ca. 1910). Gift of explicit paper sign. William H. Helfand. Medicinal nostrums are over-

30 whelmingly represented, but apparatuses are the focus of many pamphlets as well. The Erie Medical Company’s vacuum appliance promised to increase blood flow to weak and small organs A( Treatise for Men Only on Debility and Atrophy [Buffalo, ca. 1888]), and Dr. Sherman’s nonsur- gical treatment of hernia was graphically illustrated in the pages of an extremely rare pamphlet included in this gift,Illustrated Supplement to Dr. J. A. Sherman’s Pamphlet on Hernia and Its Cure (New York, 1880). Over a period of eleven years, Dr. Sherman was three times the target of Anthony Comstock, who considered the distribution of this pamphlet through the mail a violation of the Comstock Act of 1873. Comstock ar- gued that the illustrations were obscene and that the pamphlet was being sent to girls and women. The illustrations certainly are striking in their detailed depictions of (supposedly) actual named men, standing with their pants around their ankles, before, during, and after treatment with Sherman’s equipment. Though the courts did not consider the pamphlet obscene the first two times that Comstock brought it before them, he would not give up and was finally able to see Sherman convicted after his third arrest and trial. In addition to reading about tonics and apparatuses that would cure their diseases, men (and sometimes women) could increase their own medical understanding by visiting so-called anatomical museums, many of which were operated by purveyors of patent medicines. Mr. Helfand’s gift includes more than twenty-five catalogs from such museums. The earliest of these is the 1852 Catalogue of the Grand Anatomical Museum or National Academy of Natural, Anatomical, and Pathological Science, which was the establishment of Pomeroy & Co. in New York. The museum is described in the catalog as “a grand panorama of the human micro- cosm in all its minute particulars, and multitudinous phases.” Anatomical museums typically displayed preserved specimens of anatomy as well as replicas, often in wax, of manifestations of ailments, of the stages of preg- nancy, and even of historical figures. Dr. Baskette’s Gallery of Anatomy in Chicago, whose circa-1880 catalog we also received, included figures of several Mormons of note, complete with a history of the sect. Brigham Young was displayed in wax, along with twenty of his wives, as well as John D. Lee, the leader of the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre in Utah Territory.

31 Some anatomical museums were open to men and women, and even, at times, children, but only when accompanied by their parents. Most museums, however, were clearly marked as being for men only. Also for men only were the vast majority of pocket street guides, more than four hundred of which were included in Mr. Helfand’s gift. Like the anatomical museums, these were most frequently the product of patent medicine dealers and doctors with dubious credentials. Dating from the late-19th to the mid-20th centuries, the pamphlet-sized street guides included information useful to the visitor to a city, such as the baseball schedule or bus routes. They were specific to each town and reflected the identity of visitors or immigrants to those towns, sometimes containing translations of all or part of the text. Where Chicago guides might include Swedish and German translations, Phila- delphia guides were more likely to include Italian and Polish. The guides also routinely included ad- vice on avoiding and, failing that, treating venereal disease. Direc- tions were provided to the local offices of a physician who special- ized in treating these diseases (and was likely to have published the guide), as well as an explanation of the kinds of treatments available. Before penicillin (and after mercury fell out of favor), the only somewhat effective treatments for syphilis were those developed under the direction of Paul Ehrlich around 1910. These went by the names 606 and 914, or Salvarsan and Neosalvarsan, respectively, and were injectable arsenic com- National Medical Institute. Things People Will Not Talk About and St. Louis Street pounds. The popularity of these Guide. (St. Louis: ca. 1937). Gift of treatments is easily seen in these William H. Helfand. street guides, where they are rou-

32 tinely described as “a blessing to mankind.” When penicillin came into common use for the treatment of syphilis in the 1940s, references to it in the street guides were abundant and reflected the sensational reception of that miracle drug. Mr. Helfand’s gift greatly strengthens our existing holdings relating to men’s health and complements our very strong collection of women’s health materials. For much of our material relating to women’s health, and the history of American healthcare generally, we have to thank another longtime donor, Dr. Charles E. Rosenberg. In 2011 Dr. Rosenberg added to his considerable history of generosity by giving approximately four hundred volumes from his own library. Many of these were items he acquired and used in writing his acclaimed 1987 work The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System, in which he examined the transformation of American healthcare through the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th centuries. This transformation involved changes in the understanding of disease and cure, in healthcare for the poor and the paying, in medical training, in the built medical facility, and in the development of nursing, among other things—each topic being represented in this collection of materials. The development of medical institutions is particularly well-documented in this collection. There are reports on such institutions as the New York Hospital, the Boston Dispensary, and Johns Hopkins Hospi- tal. Specialty medical centers are represented as well, including those focused on eye care (New York Ophthalmic Hospital, Chicago Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary), on the mentally ill (Maine Insane Hospital, New York City Hospital for the Insane), and on women (Brooklyn Maternity, the Preston Retreat, Woman’s Hospital of the State of Illinois). Every aspect of hospital development is addressed, including administration and finance, education and behavior of employees, and evalua- tions of success and mortality rates. Hospital architecture, too, features prominently. In An Account of the New-York Hospital (New York, 1820), two fold-out leaves at the front of the small volume show the hospital campus as seen from the street, complete with cattle lounging in the spa- cious front yard, and four diagrams of two floors each of the lunatic asylum and hospital buildings. Placement of the kitchens, laundry, library, and patient rooms are clearly noted. The Account goes into great detail

33 Plates from Society of the New York Hospital. An Account of the New-York Hospital. (New York: Mahlon Day, 1820). Gift of Charles E. Rosenberg.

34 about the structures on the hospital campus. Regarding the asylum, a later addition necessitated by the great numbers of mentally ill patients being admitted, it explains, “being separate from the other house, the sick are not incommoded by the lunatics, who have separate yards inclosed, one for males, and the other for females, where such as can be trusted at large, are permitted to walk in the open air.” Fresh air was key for treatment of the insane and the diseased alike. It was a basic tenet of hospital development for much of the 19th century. In Hospital Construction (Boston, 1861), one of the many medical journal reprints included in this gift, Dr. Francis H. Brown wrote that he started “with these principia—abundance of air; abundance of sunshine; simplicity of construction. These are the essentials; without these no hospital can exist and perform its proper function in the community; and under these heads may be included all the minutiae of hospital construction.” Of these three, clean air was the most important by far, in keeping with the theory that miasma (pollution, specifically of air) was the cause of transmission of virulent diseases. In the 1840s and 1850s, evidence began to mount in favor of the germ theory of disease, but it was not until the work of, most notably, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister in the 1860s and 1870s that popular opinion began to shift. In Valentine Francis Mott’s Thesis on Hospital Hygiene (New York, 1859), a copy of which we received in this gift, Mott discusses in great detail the importance to the construction of hospitals of the understanding that miasma caused infec- tion, citing case after case in which overcrowding and impure air caused extreme mortality rates. He is clearly aware of the arguments against the prevailing theory, but explains that he will not spend time defending it because, “though I should discuss for a year, I could only arrive at the point from which I started.” With a dismissive literary wave he writes, “They, whose imaginations are vivid and fertile, and whose eyesight is as swift and piercing as the electric fluid, may take their microscopes and revel, if they so desire, in the delightful contemplation of the capricious gambols of a billion of the cruel little spores, or zoophytes, which they assert have chosen the miasm of yellow-fever and other diseases for their happy home.” A decade later, hospital planners were starting to take germ theory more seriously. In 1873, when Johns Hopkins set about funding what

35 would become his eponymous hospital and university, the trustees of the hospital were tasked with seeking the wisdom of preeminent authorities on hospital management and construction before setting out to build his institution. One of those whose opinion was sought was surgeon John S. Billings, who would become the most influential voice in the design of the hospital. His essay “Hospital Construction and Organization” was published in Hospital Plans: Five Essays Relating to the Construction, Or- ganization, and Management of Hospitals, Contributed by Their Authors for the Use of the Johns Hopkins Hospital of Baltimore (New York, 1875). The copy of this work that came from Dr. Rosenberg in this gift has extra blank leaves bound in and was likely intended for use by the trustees. In his essay, Billings addresses those still hesitant to accept germ theory. He is gentle but firm when he writes that “whatever may be the opinions held as to the nature of these diseased germs, and their mode of origin and propagation, they are what we have to fear and provide against in the construction of a hospital.” He goes on to say that the evidence he provides “should be considered not as theories, but as an account of facts which it is easy to verify.” Accounts of facts in support of germ theory had been around for at least several decades by this point, but proponents were still finding themselves fighting an uphill battle. At the same time that hospitals were slowly accepting germ theory and the changes it necessitated, they were also facing changes in their workforce through the creation of a skilled nursing profession, a change well-documented in this collection. Like their reluctance to embrace germ theory, it took several decades for American institutions to fully embrace the tenets espoused and demonstrated by Florence Nightingale. In her groundbreaking 1859 work Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, Nightingale contrasts the traditional view of nurses as defined mainly by their qualities (“devoted and obedient,” according to men, or “sober, honest, and chaste,” according to women) and her modern view of nurses as defined by their skills (observation and judgment). She gives primacy to the nurse’s role in aiding “Nature’s reparative processes” —by creating a clean, calm, comfortable, and well-ventilated environment in which the body could heal itself. Nurses like this were not born but made through proper training. Neither were all women suited to the profession, though they were certainly more likely to be equipped for the work

36 than men. Nurses meeting Nightingale’s requirements could not simply be former inmates of institutions, retired prostitutes, and recovering al- coholics promoted to assist in the care of the still sick, as was so often the case at the time. An 1860 edition in this gift includes a contemporary gift inscription praising the author. By the 1870s, several schools of nursing were active in America. These were tied to hospitals that benefited from the labor of the train- ees. Annual reports of several such institutions were received in this gift, including early reports from the nursing schools attached to Bellevue Hospital, Brooklyn Homoeopathic Maternity, and the Philadelphia Maternity Hospital. But the need for trained nurses was an issue long before these institutions were established, and before Florence Nightin- gale became a cause célèbre. One piece in this collection describes the great difficulties of maintaining a stable workforce of trained nurses because of the lack of resources provided to women willing to perform the work. In Appeal of the Managers of the Philadelphia Lying-In Charity, to Their Fellow-Citizens, for the Means of Providing a Home for Nurses (Philadelphia, 1849), the author writes of the great work that was being done by trained nurses in caring for poor women of the city in their time of confinement. But these nurses, we are told, had at times needed to abandon the profession for which they trained, and for which there was such a need, because occupations such as needlework were a more reli- able source of income. The hope of the managers was that a home would be established in which nurses-in-training could reside, but which might also house nurses already in the profession who could not afford other lodgings. The collections of the Library Company already held an 1851 report of the Managers of the Philadelphia Lying-In Charity, in which the success of the 1849 campaign, and consequent building of the home, is described in some detail. The depth of our collections allows researchers to reconstruct the historical record from connecting pieces. Gifts like those from Dr. Rosenberg and Mr. Helfand serve to deepen and broaden our existing holdings, making new materials available to our researchers, and allowing many more connections to be made.

Rachel A. D’Agostino Curator of Printed Books

37 African Americana

Increasingly, when we come home from the African American His- tory market with an empty basket, we have to take what comfort we can in the knowledge that we are victims of our own success, both in building a collection over many years and in building a market. We see many items for sale, but very few that are right for our collection. This is both because we have an awful lot of the relevant pre-20th-century literature already, and because we are in a rich local collection context, with significant African American material next door at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in the Blockson Collection at Temple University, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Quaker Collections at Haverford and Swarthmore, and it is our policy not to purchase items already available in area collections, as much as we might covet them. Nonetheless, we do manage each year to acquire some truly noteworthy historical materials. Interessantes Gespräch über Sclaveren in America zwischen Nabob und Gottlieb, im Staate Georgien is a rare and interesting German-language antislavery pamphlet. There is no imprint, but from the contents we date this no later than 1850, probably printed in Ohio. It is a dialogue between Gottlieb and the slaveholder Nabob, on his way to market to sell fifty slaves. Gottlieb presents a Christian argument against slavery, and Nabob eventually agrees that slaveholders will likely face con- demnation by a righteous and just God. German Americans were largely opposed to slavery from the beginning; one of the earliest appeals against slavery in America comes from Philadelphia’s Germantown in 1688, and many of the German immigrants fleeing the revolutionary upheavals in Europe in the 1840s were similarly equality-minded. We have many Ger- man American imprints, including numerous earlier antislavery and political works, and we are pleased with this interesting new addition. From Boston in the same period, in the heat of the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, is a rare and important work, The Defen- sive League of Freedom (Boston, 1854), documenting organized resistance to the law in the wake of the uprising over the capture of fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Both black and white abolitionists mobilized already sympathetic citizens to protest Burns’s arrest, pro forma trial, and return to slavery. Protesters were likely further galvanized by several ministers

38 who condemned the outrage against Burns from the pulpit and whose subsequently published sermons grace our collections. Local mobs filled the streets, an attack on the jail resulted in the killing of a deputy, and several hundred federal troops were required to escort Burns to a wait- ing ship and return to slavery. In response, locals formed the Defensive League, whose “distinct purpose [was] to see that no man [was] beaten down by the Slave Power, without an adequate defense,” by providing legal assistance to captured fugitives along with legal and financial aid to those arrested for helping them. The arrest of Underground Railroad activists, subject to prison and heavy fines, was a tactic of proslavery of- ficials, and it took a heavy toll on many. This brief work details such cases in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Massachusetts. Two significant additions to the collection touch on the history of the black Atlantic world. The first is noted black activist and lawyer David Augustus Straker’s Reflections on the Life and Times of Toussaint L’Overture, the Negro Haytien (Columbia, S.C., 1886). Straker was originally from Barbados but settled in South Carolina to pursue a career

David Augustus Straker, Reflections on the Life and Times of Toussaint L’Overture(Columbia, S.C., 1886). Purchased with funds from the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation.

39 Patrick Henry Reason, Pictorial lettersheet containing illustration of “Am I Not a Woman and Sister” (New York, and Sister” (New York, Henry Pictorial lettersheet containing illustration of I Not a Woman Reason, Patrick “Am Foundation. with funds from the Albert1835). Purchased M. Greenfield

40 as an educator, first among the freedmen, later at a local black college. He was also a prominent attorney and a Congressman for a time. Straker bemoans white historians’ neglect of people of African descent, which “teaches the lesson that in a large measure the negro must be himself his own historian.” Straker’s forty-eight-page pamphlet is a powerful work of black nationalism. “Let the lisping child learn to love and praise the greatest man of the negro race that ever lived,” he wrote. “Let the veil of charitable criticism pass over these lines herein offered, and believe me, dear reader, that they are penned only in love and affection for my hero, and in just pride of him, as one of the noblest descendants of Africa, our fatherland.” Also set in Haiti is a French novel by one Mlle. de Palaiseau, L’Histoire de Mesdemoiselles de Saint-Janvier, les Deux Seules Blanches Sauvées du Massacre de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1812), which purports to tell of two American children just after the Revolution. We are curious about any re- lationship to a novel by Philadelphian Leonora Sansay, whose Secret His- tory, or, The Horrors of Santo Domingo (Philadelphia, 1808), an account of an American on the scene during the final throes of the revolution, went through three editions. Or is our new acquisition perhaps an example of “loser literature,” like the plantation romances of our post-Civil War era mourning the Lost Cause? From leading free blacks in the Northeast comes the last group of acquisitions to be reported on here. Patrick Henry Reason was one of a very few commercially successful African American engravers; his steady career spanned six decades. Born in New York to free black parents who emigrated from the French West Indies, he attended the New York Af- rican Free School, where his artistic talents were nurtured. His first published work was an engraving of his school, appearing as a frontispiece to Charles C. Andrews’s History of the New-York African Free Schools (New York, 1830). In 1833 he was apprenticed to a New York engraver, and his professional career took off shortly thereafter. Abolitionists were major supporters of the African Free Schools, and early in Reason’s career he enjoyed their patronage, exemplified by our newly acquired letterhead engraving of a kneeling female slave, captioned “Engraved by P. Reason, A Colored Young Man of the City of New York, 1835.” It is an example of stationery produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society, today very

41 rare. The letter itself is a largely misspelled antislavery screed to South Carolina slaveholder S. J. Houlk condemning him for brutal cruelty, ending with the admonition “Let the slave go free an y can do you work yourself.” Reason later turned his attention to portraiture, and we hold half a dozen examples from books and periodicals, including likenesses of Brit- ish abolitionist Granville Sharp, fugitive slaves James Williams and Hen- ry Bibb, Ohio Congressman Benjamin Tappan, mathematician Robert Adrain, and American statesman George Mifflin Dallas. He returned to allegory in 1839 with his antislavery engraving “The Truth Shall Make You Free,” which appeared as the frontispiece to the abolitionist annual The Liberty Bell (and was reproduced on the cover of our 1994 publication The Abolitionist Sisterhood). Reason also has a local family con- nection: his brother Charles (an African Free School alumnus like his brother and a mathematician) was for several years head of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, the most notable academic institution for African Americans in antebellum America, now called Cheyney Univer- sity. A century before the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools, the issue came to a head in Boston in 1848 when Sarah Roberts, a five-year-old African Ameri- can girl, was denied admission to her neighborhood whites-only school. White abolitionists joined Sarah’s father, Benjamin Roberts, and other black activists to push for the closing of the Smith School, Boston’s one black school, and the integration of its pupils into the larger neighborhood public system. Though the Smith School was underfunded, the curriculum limited, and many teachers poorly trained, the desegregation effort was not universally supported by local blacks. As they saw it, whatever its problems, it was at least a black-controlled enterprise, and many didn’t trust their children to often-indifferent white instructors, senti- ments that resurfaced in the black community during the 20th-century school desegregation movement. In denying the petition of Roberts and others to integrate the school system, the Boston School Committee was partly swayed by the lack of unanimity among the city’s African Ameri- cans. One opponent of the desegregation move was Thomas P. Smith, a black clothing dealer. While our collection holds the Boston School

42 Committee’s reports on its decision as well as pro-desegregation arguments by lawyer and abolitionist Charles Sumner, Smith’s pamphlet, An Address Delivered Before the Colored Citizens of Boston in Opposition to the Abolition of Colored Schools, on Monday Evening, December 24, 1849 (Boston, 1850), a 2011 acquisition, is an interesting glimpse into black opposition to elements of the organized antislavery movement. Many more conservative Christians, like Smith, distrusted the mix of reforms that comprised the organized abolitionist package, particularly “the unheard of and extraordinary rights of women and petticoat government.” We also acquired another token of the artistic careers of our friends the Webbs of Philadelphia. In our 1990 Annual Report we wrote of the talented Frank Webb, an early African American novelist whose The Garies and Their Friends (London, 1857) is the first such work to deal with free black life in a northern city, i.e., the Philadelphia of Frank’s youth. This year we feature his no-less-talented wife Mary, a noted dramatic reader with a lively career in the mid-1850s. Dramatic and Miscellaneous Read- ings by Mrs. Webb, the Black Siddons is our small play- bill from her performance in Bangor, Maine, in 1855. Accompanying the notice Dramatic and Miscellaneous Readings by Mrs. Webb, the are warm reviews of her var- Black Siddons (Bangor, Maine, 1855).

43 ied program, including readings from Shakespeare, Molière, and popular folk sources. Mary played here in her hometown and throughout New England before the couple traveled in 1856 to England, where Frank’s novel was published the following year. Mary was a close friend of Har- riet Beecher Stowe, who rewrote a passage from Uncle Tom’s Cabin ex- pressly for her readings, which was later published as The Christian Slave. We are on the lookout for the London edition of this brief work as it includes Stowe’s brief account of Mary, about whom information is pret- ty thin, and the American edition does not. Mary and Frank returned briefly to Philadelphia in 1858 before migrating to Kingston, Jamaica, where Frank had secured a postal appointment with the aid of British abolitionist supporters. Mary died shortly thereafter, possibly in childbirth. Frank later returned to the United States, attended Howard University Law School in 1870, and wrote another novel which was serialized in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper. We have in our files a copy of a letter from him to a journalist mentioning his manuscript of another novel, Paul Sumner, which seems never to have been published. Phil Lapsansky Curator of African American History

44 Women’s History: The Inauguration of the Davida T. Deutsch Women’s History Fund

For many years the Library Company has made a special commit- ment to the subject of women’s history. Beginning this year, thanks to the newly created Davida T. Deutsch Women’s History Fund, we can increase the research strength of that aspect of the collection through an endowed acquisitions program. We are enormously grateful to Davida Deutsch for her farsighted awareness of the importance of women’s lives and endeavors through history. All the items discussed below were purchased with the Deutsch Fund unless otherwise noted. Our chapeaux are off to Davida! The first major purchase with the Deutsch Fund was Mrs. C. M. Bad- ger’s Wild Flowers Drawn and Colored from Nature (New York, 1859). Each of its twenty-two lithographed plates is paired with a poem by the prolific Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865). Mrs. Sigourney had a special tal- ent for memorial poetry, but she also wrote in other subgenres, and often was hired on commission. Because of the size of the volume and the virtuosity of the hand-colored plates, this volume has long been considered important by connoisseurs. The study of flowers was a genteel pastime for 19th-century women, seamlessly combining science, decorative arts, and religious sentiment. But what little we know about Clar- issa Munger Badger (1806–1889) pertains to her male relatives. Her father, George Munger, was a por- “Cardinal Flower,” in Mrs. C. M. Badger. trait painter, and her husband, Wild Flowers Drawn and Colored from Nature Milton Badger, was a Congrega- (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859). tional minister. Perhaps one of our Lithograph.

45 (New York, 1852). Center copy purchased with the Davida Deutsch Fund; left and right copies, gifts of gifts copies, and right left Fund; Deutsch Davida the with purchased copy Center 1852). Zinman. Michael York, (New Atlantic Souvenir The

46 researchers can shed more light on the woman herself and how such a tour-de-force came to be published. This past year we have been working with Chief of Conservation Jen- nifer W. Rosner on her research project on painted papier-mâché bindings. The style was popular in the mid-19th century as a deluxe option for gift books and other lavishly produced volumes. We received numerous examples of these extraordinarily eye-catching bindings as part of the Mi- chael Zinman Binding Collection in 1999 and have continued to acquire additional examples since. The Conservation Department has posted over fifty images in a file on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/librarycompany/sets/72157605142031847/), so this past year we were especially pleased to get another copy of The Atlantic Souvenir (New York, 1852) with a lovely papier-mâché binding, decorated with mother-of-pearl, as they invariably were. Hannah F. Gould (1789–1865) was one of the editors of this iconic 19th-century gift book. Shown here is our new copy flanked by two copies from the Zinman Collec- tion, each with papier-mâché covers of a different design. We are particularly interested in discovering whether there are printed sources for these designs. Any suggestions appreciated! Less glamorous, but also extraordinary is Red Riding Hood (Boston, 1863) with its text and design by Lydia Very (1823–1901). Produced by the lithography firm of Louis Prang, it goes down in history as the first shape book in America. Very, the sister of Transcen- dentalist poet Jones Very, deserves more scholarly attention. We will be on the lookout for an affordable copy of the Lydia Very. Red Riding Hood 1856 edition of her poetry, to pair with (Boston: L. Prang & Co., 1863).

47 this remarkable children’s book. Even more humble but rarer still is Every Lady Her Own Shoemak- er, or, A Complete Self-Instructor in the Art of Making Gaiters and Shoes (New York, 1856). This slight pamphlet includes six plates of patterns for shoes. Our copy shows signs of use—crude repair stitching, surprising given the fact that even an amateur cobbler likely could have done better! Our conservators boxed the pamphlet together with reproductions of the patterns in the event that someone will want to try their hand at making a pair of shoes. In the mid-19th century, many women worked long hours in textile factories such as those in Lowell, Massachusetts. After a visit to Lowell, English cleric and polymath William Scoresby (1789–1857) compared the conditions for its female textile workers favorably to those of their counterparts in England. We read in his American Factories and Their Female Operatives (Boston, 1845), published soon after the original Lon- don edition, that he advocates protective legislation to shorten the work day for English factory workers—to a mere twelve hours. From an historical perspective, Scoresby’s assessment of the high moral character, edu- cational vigor, and industriousness of the women who worked in Lowell factories became fodder for legions of industrialists determined to justify the increasingly exploitative American factory system. Scoresby’s focus on moral character makes it an important companion to works in the collection on philanthropic theory, both old and new. A charity run by women issued our newly acquired pamphlet, hitherto unrecorded: The By-Laws and Regulations of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows (New York, 1811). In it, the Society claimed to have helped more than three hundred widows and nine hundred children since November 1809. Recipients of the Society’s charity needed to be of good character; for example, any widow who was found begging publicly or selling liquor would be dropped as unworthy of aid. We also were lucky to acquire another item issued by a reform group, the 1849 volume of The Friend of Virtue: A Semi-Monthly Periodical De- voted to the Cause of Moral Purity, published by the New England Female Moral Reform Society. The Society primarily sought to combat prostitution, which it saw as the result of evil-doers taking advantage of naive young women. A regular feature of the periodical was a column entitled

48 “Scene in the Police Court.” As with similar publications, the case histories could be read as salacious stories, despite the earnestness of the female reformers in publishing them as a means to rescue fallen women. For example, in the February 15th issue, we read that, “About eighteen months since, [Miss Henrietta Belden of Salem, Mass.] took a situation in a factory in Lowell.” For the first six weeks her older sister looked out for her. After her sister took a better job in Nashua, New Hampshire, “a certain well known demi-devil in the shape of a woman, went to Lowell, and . . . among other victims for lust and crime, selected Miss Belden.” Lured to Boston supposedly to learn dressmaking, she found herself captive in a brothel. Finally, appearing in Police Court after a raid, “the sickly hue of her once roseate cheeks fully exhibited the dreadful inroads which had been made by the unhallowed monster . . . who compelled her to receive his lascivious embraces.” The court allowed the Society to se- lect housing for these fallen women, and then their Visiting Committee made regular reports of their progress . . . or lack thereof. Prostitution had become a sizeable part of the urban economy by the middle of the 19th century, and working as a prostitute or madam was much more lucrative than other occupations, so the reformers had an uphill battle. In recent years we have been intrigued by the many books that were written by 19th-century women with disabilities. We know of three women poets who were students at the New York Institution for the Blind: Cynthia Bullock (b. 1821), Fanny Crosby (1820–1915), and Al- ice A. Holmes (1821–1914). Given their birth dates, we surmised that they might easily have been there as students at the same time. Each of these women continued to publish into middle age and beyond; together, their twelve books appeared from 1847 to 1897. This past year we acquired Alice Holmes’s first book,Poems (New York, 1849), which joins two others already in the collection. According to the preface, Alice Holmes caught smallpox on board ship when her family emigrated from Norfolk, England. The illness left her blind, so her view of the New York City harbor was “her first and last view of the sunlight” in her new country. And we know that Alice Holmes did indeed know Cynthia Bullock, because one of her poems is titled “Lines addressed to Miss Cynthia Bull- ock.” By the time the poem was written they were no longer in school together, but Alice remembers her fondly, and the last stanza reads, “So,

49 though on earth we’re severed far, / Unitedly in love / Let us press on to yon bright world, / And join the saints above.” This reinforces the idea in the preface that she felt a “bitter pang” when leaving her companions at the institution and turned to poetry as “solace in her darker hour.” Other women turned to writing poetry during illness. Philadelphian Emma Lewis wrote her book Night Watches, or, The Peace of the Cross (Philadelphia, 1853) “during the progress of a nervous disease, so distressing in its symptoms, that the maintenance of a connected train of thought seemed wonderful.” We already had Lewis’s second book, Trea- sures of Darkness (Philadelphia, 1854), and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds her manuscript volume that includes poems from that book. Lewis annotated a number of poems in the volume to indi- cate where the poems were published. They appeared in newspapers such as The Christian Observer, a Philadelphia weekly, and The Philadelphia Daily Register. Since she published under her initials “E. L.,” the notes will greatly aid researchers.

Mary Rankin. Daughter of Affliction (Dayton, 1871), book and manuscript. The manuscript is the gift of Clarence Wolf.

50 Among many generous gifts made by Trustee Clarence Wolf in 2011 is the manuscript for The Daughter of Affliction by Mary Rankin (1821–1889), an amputee who lived in constant pain. The manuscript corresponds to the text of the book’s second edition of 1871, a copy of which we purchased earlier this year (by extraordinary coincidence). Miss Rankin had allowed her physician to abridge her text for the first edition of 1858, which is also already in the collection. But after the sale of four thousand copies she decided to restore the full text for a second edition. The manuscript has marks that were almost certainly made by the typesetter, the sort of evidence to which printing historians rarely have access. And of course having the manuscript and both editions of the book will be a bonanza for researchers studying this interesting sub- set of women writers. Special thanks to Clarence Wolf for making this concentration possible. We bought the autobiographical A Narrative of the Christian Ex- perience (Providence, 1839) by Elleanor Knight, knowing it was the self-published text of a Baptist circuit rider, so it was exactly the sort of item we would want to increase the strength of our holdings related to women in religion. On examination, we discovered that epi- sodes of domestic violence at the hands of her drunken husband were what prompted Knight to become an itinerant minister. The pamphlet even includes poetry she wrote on the subject, one verse of which is:

I must learn to forgive, or I can’t be forgiven; It is the language of Scripture, I believe it is true, Oh may I henceforward retain this good spirit, And pity a man that’s degraded like you.

We cannot think of any more forthright assessment of spousal abuse in the collection. Much more typically, the women blamed themselves. For example, Life and Writings of Mrs. Christiana B. Cowell (Biddeford, Maine, 1872) contains extensive transcriptions from Mrs. Cowell’s journal, starting on January 5, 1841, the day she married the Rev. D. B. Cow- ell. On December 31, 1841, she berates herself, “I fear I have been in the way of my husband that he has seen no more reformation.” A former owner has annotated this entry in pencil: “Dear honest soul. The fault

51 was all on the other side.” And indeed there were faults among the clergy of 19th-century America, some of which led to media circuses or inspired novels such as George Lippard’s Quaker City (1845) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850). The most famous, the Beecher-Tilton scandal of the 1870s, about which we wrote in the 2009 Annual Report, prompted much spill- ing of ink—but at least no one died. Decades earlier, in 1833, Methodist minister Ephraim K. Avery found himself accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a textile worker. Cornell was five months pregnant at the time of her death, five months after both had attended the same Method- ist camp meeting. She was discovered hanging from the frame of a hay- stack in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Her death appeared to be a suicide until a note was discovered in her lodgings: “If I should be missing, enquire of the Rev. Mr. Avery, of Bristol—he will know where I am.” Mr. Avery was unable to explain why he had been seen “wandering” in the area on the day that she died and fled to Rindge, New Hampshire, where he was ap- prehended and brought back to Rhode Island to stand trial. We have long had the defense’s version of the trial by Richard Hil- dreth, but this year we were able to acquire the prosecution’s version, Trial of Rev. Mr. Avery . . . Reported by Benjamin F. Hallett (Boston, 1833). The defense portrayed Cornell as vain, emotionally unstable, and untrustworthy. Avery was acquitted, but the public believed him guilty. Mobs even burned him in effigy. In addition to various publications on the month-long trial, we have a pamphlet specifically on the events in Rindge, an oversize pamphlet that reproduces unsigned letters to Cornell said to be in Avery’s handwriting, a book-length account, and a pamphlet Avery himself published the following year as a “vindication of the result of the trial.” In the aftermath, Avery moved to Ohio and took up farm- ing. The Avery-Cornell scandal became a black mark against Methodists, Methodist camp meetings, and their attendees’ religious enthusiasm. In 1836 the Rev. Barnabas Phinney (1798–1848) also may have sought to make the evidence disappear after impregnating the Phinneys’ fourteen-year-old servant, Aurelia Chalker. Phinney, a Congregational minister in Pawtucket, took Chalker by railroad to Boston and left her at the House of Refuge. According to the anonymous author of our pamphlet, A Statement of the Case of Rev. Barnabas Phinney (Westborough,

52 Mass., 1836), the naive young woman initially identified Phinney as the father of her child, but later claimed that the father was a stranger named “Johnson” after Phinney told her to lie. “In her weakness and extreme youth, she became an instrument to be used and moved as would best suit his purposes.” In another case, the Rev. Joy Hamlet Fairchild (1790–1859) was found guilty of impregnating the Fairchilds’ servant girl, Rhoda David- son, by an ecclesiastical court in New Hampshire in July 1844 and then acquitted in a municipal court in Boston in March 1845. We already had a pamphlet version of the transcript from the first trial and two editions of Fairchild’s Iniquity Unfolded, which he self-published in his own defense in October 1844. We just acquired a pamphlet from the following year, The Truth Revealed: Statement & Review of the Whole Case of the Reverend Joy H. Fairchild (Boston, 1845), in which the anonymous author quotes a letter Fairchild wrote to Rhoda Davidson, calling it “the

Joy H. Fairchild. Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Rev. J. H. Fairchild (Boston, 1855).

53 letter . . . of a seducer humbled and subdued by the idea that he is now in that victim’s power.” In the years that followed, it is clear that Fairchild did indeed consider himself the real victim. According to another newly acquired pamphlet, Correspondence between Rev. Nehemiah Adams and Rev. J. H. Fairchild (Boston, 1846), given to us by Michael Brown, the Rev. Mr. Adams refused to let the congregants of his church attend the Payson Church in South Boston, where Fairchild was pastor. Ostensibly the pamphlet was published by sympathizers in Fairchild’s congregation, but the rhetoric suggests that Fairchild himself was the author. Then, nearly a decade later, Fairchild published Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Rev. J. H. Fairchild (Boston, 1855), which has section headings such as “Another Plot for My Ruin.” We just acquired a copy of the second edition. Fairchild may have been acquitted in the Boston court in March 1845, but he continued to seek acquittal in the court of public opinion for more than a decade thereafter. Of all the trials related to clerical misconduct, the ecclesiastical trial of Episcopalian Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk (1791–1861) in late 1844 is the one that led to the most published commentary. According to the women who provided affidavits, Onderdonk groped their breasts (“thrust his hand into [their] bosom”) at moments that were only somewhat private, typically when their husbands were nearby—in carriages, gardens, sitting rooms, and even when they were receiving communion. The women were wives of young clergymen and, as Patricia Cline Cohen has suggested, the situation was very awkward and distressing for them because of the power difference, both between Onderdonk and themselves and between their husbands and a senior cleric. The verdict, delivered in January 1845, effectively censured Onderdonk. He was relieved of his duties, but kept his salary and position. According to the January 9th issue of the New-York Herald, D. Appleton & Company paid eight hundred dollars for the copyright to the trial transcript, so the general public again got a chance to read all the salacious details. Unlike the other cases discussed so far, an extraordinary number of pamphlets were written by other members of the clergy, many of them written in support of Onderdonk. We already had twenty pamphlets relating to the trial, and this year we acquired another: Appeal and Review: An Appeal from the Sentence of the Bishop of New-York (New York, 1845),

54 which was published under the auspices of the Churchman’s Book-Store. An anonymous author in The Churchman, the official organ of the Epis- copal Church, suggested that the bishop’s actions were “comparatively light.” A non-clerical writer, Nathaniel Parker Willis, went farther, fault- ing the women for signaling their openness to Onderdonk’s touches. Onderdonk also wrote a pamphlet in his own defense, saying that the trial was part of a conspiracy against him related to his “High Church” leanings, at a time when there were indeed factions within the denomi- nation. But from an examination of the massive amount of print on the subject, one senses that Onderdonk simply got a thrill from being able to touch women’s breasts with apparent impunity due to his rank as a bishop. And the various pamphleteers primarily sought to establish that the rumors were not adequately substantiated. Such who-knew-what- when discussions miss the point that Onderdonk’s actions had compli- cated consequences for the women he groped. James C. Richmond, the cleric who obtained their testimony, had personally assured the women who provided affidavits that “the whole matter was to be kept within the House of Bishops.” In Richmond’s pamphlet A Defence of the Ladies (New York, 1845), one of three he wrote on matters relating to the trial, he protests the publication of the trial transcript. We can only imagine how the women felt. Henry Ward Beecher, Ephraim Avery, Joy Hamlet Fairchild, Benjamin Onderdonk, and others earned their place in history by seduc- ing, impregnating, or “merely” groping women. But more well-behaved pastors also deserve a mention. Consider Congregational minister Mil- ton Badger (1800–1873), who was the secretary of the American Home Missionary Society and the husband of Clarissa Munger Badger. We’d like to think that the Rev. Mr. Badger was a devoted husband who en- couraged his wife’s artistic and scientific pursuits, resulting in her magnificent Wild Flowers Drawn and Colored from Nature (New York, 1859).

Cornelia S. King Curator of Women’s History

55 Visual Culture:

Historic Use of Images in Commerce and Recreation

The Library Company’s Visual Culture Program proclaimed its exis- tence to the world in 2011 with the launch of a new website and a series of special events. Also in 2011, VCP at LCP made its first acquisitions supported through a special fund created with a grant from the Walter J. Miller Trust. The material acquired represents the breadth of research uses to which visual culture can be put, from the insights into historic consumer marketing to be gleaned from labels, trade cards, and circulars to the lessons about book arts, entertainment, and leisure offered by a charming peepshow, more often referred to as a “tunnel book.” With additional funds provided by the Program in Early American Economy and Society and Trustees Charles E. Rosenberg and William Helfand, VCP was able to purchase a scrapbook containing about 1,250 pieces of ephemera produced for the Theodore Metcalf Company of Bos- ton between 1873 and 1891. The company was established in 1837 by twenty-five-year-old novice apothecary Theodore Metcalf, who stayed active in the firm until his death in 1894. Upon his death, theAmerican Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record credited Metcalf with “elevating the position of the pharmacist from the rank of a tradesman to that of a professional man.” He was the first president of the Boston Druggists’ As- sociation and a founder of the American Pharmaceutical Association. He also had close ties to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who in 1838 set up his own medical practice and the Tremont Street Medical School in offices adjacent to Metcalf ’s shop. About their association, Holmes reportedly said, “what business [we] could not attend to between [us] was looked after by the sexton across the street.” Metcalf ’s abilities as an apothecary and his ties to the Boston medical establishment helped his company flourish. But our scrapbook shows that Metcalf ’s success should also be credited to his business acumen, as evidenced by his savvy use of advertising and design to create his brand and to extend his reach in a market that he was helping to create. The ephemera in the book include proofs and samples of labels, circulars, leaflets, fliers, envelopes, tags, business cards, price lists, form letters, bill-

56 heads, business stationery, and wrapping paper and, in most instances, are accompanied by penciled-in order details. These might include unit cost, total number ordered, order date, print method to be used, and the name of the printer chosen for the job. Examples of these annotations include “Transferred & Lithographed 550 sheets = 20,900 labels $15.67 April 1874”; and “Stanley & Usher; Paper Furnished; Printing 20,000 - [$]1000/ changes in electros - [$]200/ [$]1200/ February 1883.” Various engravers and printers were engaged by the Metcalf Company, including Johnson & Dyer; Budde & Westermann; Gillam’s Sons Co.; John A. Lowell & Co.; L. Prang & Co.; Forbes Lithograph Mfg. Co; Houghton Mifflin; Mills, Knight & Co.; Pictorial Printing Co.; and Wm. H. Brett Engraving Co. The firm A. Mudge & Son was perhaps Metcalf’s most frequently used printer during this period. The Metcalf Com- pany was a hugely successful and long-lived enterprise, and this scrapbook contains evidence of how it adapted over the years, taking advantage of new printing techniques, employing innovative marketing efforts like shared mailing lists and gifts-with-purchase, and being early adopt- ers of new technologies. In November 1878 the company ordered five hundred thick paper signs, reading: “Tele- phone notice. Orders . . . Theodore Metcalf Company scrapbook, 1873-1891.

57 may be sent through ALL Telephones connected with the Telephone Despatch [sic] Company’s office, and the goods so ordered will be delivered in the city proper without extra expense. Please preserve this by tack- ing it up beside your Telephone.” The Boston Telephone Dispatch Company had formed just a few months earlier, and the first telephone line had been strung only the year before. The company’s sophisticated marketing strategies are also evident throughout the scrapbook in notes explaining to whom certain notices should be sent. For example, advertisements for a certain kind of infant food were to be sent to all who were listed in the “N.J. Medical Register between pages 21 and 56,” “all physicians in Brooklyn commencing on page lxxv,” but for the state of New York generally, “when a town has five or more doctors, send to all; when four send to one; when less than four send none.” The Metcalf Company was known for its extensive pharmaceutical prep- arations and advertised to medical professionals all over the country, but its product lines were really quite diverse. The scrapbook contains promo- tional material and labels for health products: Burnett’s Pure Cod Liver Oil (“carefully prepared only from fresh and healthy livers”), Rye & Rock (“for coughs and lung diseases”), and Crushed Cubebs (for asthma, bronchi- Theodore Metcalf Company scrap- tis, etc., “smoke the crushed cubebs in a book, 1873-1891. pipe, emitting the smoke through the

58 nose”); for toiletries: sachet powders (lavender, violet, white rose, fran- gipani, patchouli), Philocome Oil (“flower-perfumed oil for dressing the hair”), and Cherry Lip Salve; and for culinary, and “recreational”, products: Mellin’s Infant Food, pineapple syrup and peach water, Coca Wine (“a pleasant tonic and invigorator”), Koumiss (Wine of Milk, “a highly refreshing effer- vescent preparation of milk”), and Salad Oil. The Metcalf Company also was a leading dealer in flavor ex- tracts for cooking. Inserted in the scrapbook is a movable picture booklet for “Metcalf ’s Water White Vanilla,” to be distributed to grocers. The booklet contains illustrations of women and men from all walks of life and many ethnicities, including a farmer, a Handmade tunnel book, ca. 1850. Pencil skeleton, a policeman, Uncle Sam, and ink. a Native American, an Irishman, and a Chinaman. Each illustrated page is split in two and the tops and bottoms of the pages can be moved independently to create amusing combinations. Other notable items in the book include a small number of illustrated trade cards; a pocket calendar (printed by L. Prang & Co.), with views of children and floral and winter imagery; holi- day-related advertising; six proof Peephole view of tunnel book. labels for Oak Tooth Wash con-

59 taining different woodgrain designs; an advertising card for Will. B. Dor- man’s Champagne Cologne, illustrated with an “exact facsimile in size and style” of a bottle of the novelty perfume; a circular piece of printed leather, possibly a lid for Inexhaustible Smelling Salts; and an August 8, 1877, “Copartnership Notice” announcing the departure of Samuel M. Colcord from the partnership of Thomas Doliber and Theodore Metcalf. From a thoroughly documented piece of business history, we turn to a mysterious, if fascinating, item of homemade ephemera— a peepshow. Peepshows suggest something illicit in the modern day, but for centuries this visual spectacle was more akin to popular, than adult, entertainment. Historically, the term applied to mechanisms with a peephole that were

The Showman. Philadelphia: Freeman & Co., December 1, 1796. Engraving. Gift of Dr. William M. O’Keefe.

60 intended to create an impression of depth and perspective for the user. By the 19th century, the devices had become novelties created through illustrated cutouts connected on either side by a band of accordion paper. Constructed in this manner, they became known colloquially as tunnel books, or sometimes moveable books or pop ups. Charming in scale and design, this circa-1850 “homemade” tunnel book is the first of its kind in our collections. Illustrated in a quaint and childlike manner, it depicts arched brick walls enclosing a thoroughfare, to create the image of a tunnel. Pedestrians, a man on horseback, carts, carriages, and a few frolicking dogs traverse the space that provides no obvious clues as to its specific location. Adding to the conundrum are a few barely legible inscriptions written on the extendable sides of the book. They may be female names, which provide tantalizing, but undecipherable clues as to its provenance. Luckily, the pattern on the paper used for the covers enabled us to deduce the given date. As with many optical devices, peepshows have a long and debated history. Collector and scholar Richard Balzer dates their beginnings to around the 15th century in Europe, when box-like devices with peepholes were devised to teach about the mechanics of vision. The instru- ments, often used by Renaissance artists to recreate perspective, became primarily associated with the itinerant showman by the 18th century, as depicted in our recently acquired 1793 engraving The Showman. For a nominal price, the showman offered a “rare” show composed of religious, historical, or mythical scenes. By the later 18th century peepshows en- tered the parlors of the affluent as perspective boxes in which a set of prints was arranged to create a three-dimensional view designed to enter- tain the eye and mind. By the 1820s peepshows more closely resembling our own acquisition became items of more general consumption when professionally printed, assembled, and marketed as souvenirs. Soon thereafter, peepshows began to be better known as tunnel books. Intuitively, one might think that the genre term stems from the viewer’s sense that he or she is looking through a tunnel when using the optical devices, but moveable book artist and scholar Carol Barton posits that the origin of the term is much more literal. Again we turn to Europe where in March 1843, after nearly two decades of construction, the Brit- ish completed the Thames Tunnel, the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

61 Built to connect the opposite banks of the Thames River for commercial purposes, the tunnel’s completion inspired a public celebration. During the first weeks of its opening, thousands ceremonially walked through the underground thoroughfare and purchased souvenirs, none of which was more popular than the Thames Tunnel peepshow. Designed with three peepholes, the paper trinket included a view through the arched brick-walled interior of this marvel of modern engineering, as well as a view across the Thames River above it. This leads us to wonder whether our own novelty may be a naïve attempt to copy the popular British souvenir. Unfortunately, inquiries to collectors and repositories that hold tunnel books have proven inconclu- sive about this identification. What is confirmed, however, is the rarity of our unique, hand-made tunnel book, as the Library Company appears to hold the only example known to exist in a public collection. As with so many of the ephemeral materials in our collection, seemingly frivolous artifacts can often be historical treasures, rather than displaced junk. Just as the Metcalf Company scrapbook is a treasure trove for researchers of printing, advertising, business, and pharmaceutical history, our rare tunnel book provides a one-of-a-kind glimpse into the history of popular entertainment and public culture. We are extremely grateful to the benefactors who assisted us with these purchases and look forward to welcoming researchers interested in working with them and exploring their implications. Rachel A. D’Agostino Curator of Printed Books & Visual Culture Program Co-Director

Erika Piola Associate Curator of Prints and Photographs & Visual Culture Program Co-Director

62 Report of the Print Department

As in past years, in 2011 our collection purchases were augmented by generous gifts from both old and new friends. This year saw a number of significant large collections come to the Print Department along with important individual items. We acquired material spanning four centuries, ranging in date from the 16th century through the 1930s, and, while the Philadelphia region continues to be a primary interest of ours, this year we received material with a worldwide focus. One of the Library Company’s most significant gifts in recent years was received in 2011 through a generous bequest of longtime supporter Robert L. McNeil, Jr. The McNeil Americana Collection consists of almost one hundred separate maps and more than five hundred books. Included are maps as early as a mid-16th-century view of the Western Hemisphere and a 17th-century depiction of America showing Califor- nia as an island. A detail of the first map or chart to focus on the Dela- ware Valley is reproduced on the back cover of this year’s Annual Report. Pieter Goos’s Paskaerte Van de Zuÿdt en Noordt Revier in Nieu Nederlant Streckende van Cabo Hinloopen tot Rechkewach was included probably as a supplement in Goos’s De Zee Atlas Ofte Water-Weereld published in 1666. On this map the site of the future settlement of Philadelphia is named Sauno, a word of unknown origins. In addition to important maps depicting the mid-Atlantic region, the McNeil Americana Collection is also strong in maps from the Revolutionary War era including William Faden’s 1777 map, Plan of the Operations of General Washington, against the King’s Troops in New Jersey, illustrating the Americans’ Christmas- time advance on British and Hessian troops at Trenton, and a manuscript map of the Battle of Brandywine. Acquiring this collection has substan- tially strengthened the Library Company’s map holdings in many areas. Among the early maps in this gift is the second state of Nicholas Joannis Visscher’s map of eastern North America extending south to the Chesapeake and north to Canada, issued in 1656 and reproduced here. Largely based on Johannes Janssonius’s 1651 map of the same geographic region, which is also part of the McNeil Americana Collection, this map derives its importance from the inclusion of a view of New Amsterdam in the lower right. By an unidentified artist, this is the second or third

63 earliest existing image of the city. The first state of the Visscher map had been issued only a year earlier, but the public’s interest in New Nether- land swelled after the Dutch captured Fort Kasimier on the Delaware River near present-day New Castle from the Swedes in early 1655. Geo- graphic errors in Visscher’s second state of the map led to decades-long disputes over the boundaries between Pennsylvania and Maryland and between New Jersey and New York. The map, however, continued to be reissued until about 1729, with Philadelphia first appearing on the third state issued in 1684. Visscher’s map epitomizes the visual and historical riches in the Mc- Neil Americana Collection. Maps not only express what is known about an area in terms of its physical boundaries at a specific point in time, but they also reveal the importance placed on particular landmarks by the

Nicholas Visscher, Novi Belgii Novaeque Angliae Nec Non Partis Virginiae Tabula (Amsterdam, ca. 1656). Engraving. The McNeil Americana Collection. Bequest of Robert L. McNeil, Jr.

64 maps’ creators. Images of bears, turkeys, rabbits, deer, beaver, and other wildlife, for example, are scattered throughout the Visscher map, as well as surrounding the cartouche of the Goos map, to remind viewers of the New World’s natural abundance. Substantial Native American settle- ments are depicted in the Visscher map’s most western regions, in the western parts of what would become Pennsylvania and New York State, perhaps visually placing these “others” at a far distance and, therefore, not an impediment to European settlement. The success of European settlement is certainly conveyed by the representation of the New Amsterdam cityscape flanked by a male and female Native American. Natives and Eu- ropeans could perhaps coexist if everyone knew their proper place.

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This year stereograph collector and Library Company shareholder Raymond Holstein generously donated the Philadelphia portion of his stereograph collection to us. This collection of approximately two thousand items added tremendously to our existing collection not only numerically, but also in strengthening specific subject areas. Longtime Annual Report readers with good memories might recall that in 1997 the Print Department reported on the purchase of seven late-19th-century stereographs of Philadelphia’s House of Refuge taken by Philip Chillman.

U. S. Naval Asylum–Laning Hall, ca. 1868. Albumen print stereograph. Raymond Holstein Stereograph Collection. Gift of Raymond Holstein.

65 Thanks to Mr. Holstein’s gift we now have five more stereographs from that series. Through this gift, our collection of views of the 1876 Cen- tennial Exposition held in Fairmount Park has grown in size and depth, particularly in terms of views taken by the Centennial Photographic Company, as has our collection of views of the Waterworks, commercial streets, and the waterfront. The stereographic view of Laning Hall reproduced here is one of thir- teen in Mr. Holstein’s gift that picture the U.S. Naval Asylum grounds, a significant increase over the Print Department’s prior holdings—consist- ing of one stereograph. This albumen print stereograph was probably taken soon after the completion of the building in 1868. Designed by John McArthur, Jr., the architect of Philadelphia’s City Hall, Laning Hall’s exuberant Second Empire style stands in stark contrast to Biddle Hall, the classically inspired main building designed by William Strickland. Originally intended to house wounded sailors from the Civil War, Lan- ing Hall later served as a home for naval veterans. The over twenty-acre site remained in the hands of the U.S. Navy until the mid-1970s, after which the property began to slide into neglect leading to Laning Hall’s demolition in the early 1990s. Biddle Hall survived a devastating fire in 2003 and today is an upscale condominium. Mr. Holstein’s gift includes several other images of Laning Hall, as well as views of Biddle Hall and the stables and roads around the U.S. Naval Asylum grounds.

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Another large collection of material came to us this year through the generosity of longtime Library Company shareholders Dr. Milton and Joan Wohl. Their gift of approximately two hundred pieces of late-19th- and early-20th-century ephemera primarily consists of trade cards for various Philadelphia businesses and products, a small selection of which is reproduced here. These trade cards offer a fascinating glimpse into advertising practices at the turn of the 20th century. Familiar businesses such as John Wa- namaker’s and Strawbridge and Clothier’s department stores and other Philadelphia landmarks are represented, as well as businesses and products less well known to contemporary readers. Advertisers, as they do to-

66 Selection of Gift of late 19th-century trade cards. Wohl. Milton and Joan Dr.

67 day, often tied their products to significant current events. The Wohls’ gift includes trade cards which attempt to capitalize on the public’s interest in both the Centennial Exposition and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to promote products completely unrelated to the celebrations. The strength of Philadelphia’s German-speaking community is evidenced by the inclusion of a card advertising Gloss laundry soap with text in both English and German. While many trade cards illustrated the product being offered for sale, many other cards relied on attractive young women, cute children, kit- tens, flowers, or beautiful landscapes to attract the attention of potential customers. Godey’s Lady’s Book, for example, hoped to appeal to its female audience with a trade card that reproduced Sleeping Love, a sentimental image of a cherub dozing in a bucolic setting. A larger print of this image, based on a painting by Léon Jean Basile Perrault (1832–1908), would be offered to new subscribers to the magazine in 1885. Notice of this offer made the front page of The Ohio Democrat on December 18, 1884, in an article declaring that the picture was “one of striking simplicity yet admi- rable composition and the figure of Sleeping Love himself with drooping eyelids and softly parted lips . . . is one of the prettiest you could well conceive of.” If that was not enough of an inducement to subscribe to the magazine, text on the trade card’s verso also promised that subscribers would receive one thousand pages of reading material and two hundred pages of illustrations to enjoy throughout the year.

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The first fifty years of artist William L. Breton’s (ca. 1773–1855) life are shrouded in mystery, although we do know that he emigrated from England to Philadelphia in the mid-1820s leaving behind a wife and children. According to Breton, he first began drawing while on board the ship to America, implying that he was abandoning an earlier career as well as his family with the move. He lived out the remaining thirty years of his life in Philadelphia, residing for many of them in a Manayunk boardinghouse, where he gained a reputation as a curmudgeon among area residents. While details of Breton’s personal life may be obscure, he leaves be-

68 hind a fairly substantial legacy as an artist. Five Breton watercolors were given to us this year, a generous gift from Marshall Potamkin in memory of his mother Vivian Potamkin. Five additional Breton watercolors will become gifts to the Library Company in 2012, bringing our total holdings to fourteen. Many Breton watercolors can also be found in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Breton’s view of George Washington’s Philadelphia residence is reproduced on the cover of this year’s Annual Report. As anyone living in the Philadelphia area knows, George Washington’s Market Street house- hold has been the subject of intense debate in recent years as the Na- tional Park Service developed the location into an historic site based on archaeological evidence of and historical research into the presence of enslaved people. Breton made numerous watercolors of the President’s House shortly before its demolition in the early 1830s. The Athenaeum, the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, and the Histori- cal Society of Pennsylvania also have Breton views of this residence. William Breton’s interest in documenting old buildings came to the attention of antiquarian John Fanning Watson, who used Breton sketch- es, including those of Washington’s residence, as the basis for many illustrations in his Annals of Philadelphia. Breton’s views of the old Slate Roof House and the building housing the Department of the United States for Foreign Affairs are other images included in this gift that were used in Watson’s Annals. Watson apparently recommended Breton as an illustra- tor for The Casket, a periodical which began publishing in Philadelphia in 1827. Our recently acquired Breton watercolor of William Penn’s treaty tree monument appeared as a wood engraving in the January 1829 issue of The Casket. The late 1820s and 1830s were Breton’s most productive artistic period. From 1829 through 1830 he produced a series of lithographic views of Philadelphia churches with the city’s pioneering lithographic firm Kennedy & Lucas; contributed images to James Mease and Thomas Porter’s Picture of Philadelphia (1831); and drew lithographic advertisements. He continued to work as an artist until his death, when “drawing papers, paints, and unfinished pictures” were found among his effects.

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69 DeWitt Clinton Baxter (ca. 1829–1881) introduced his project of publishing block-by-block views of Philadelphia’s commercial streetscape in an 1856 prospectus and, by the time he suspended work in 1861, had covered sixteen city blocks. In 1879 he resumed work on The Baxter Pan- oramic Business Directory, and this year trustee Clarence Wolf presented us with two sheets from this later phase of the project. Illustrated here is a view of the south side of Arch Street between Eighth and Ninth streets issued in February 1880. Baxter, a native Philadelphian, wore many occupational hats during his career. City directories describe him at different times as an artist, engraver, designer, and publisher, and at the time of his death he was a weighmaster at Philadelphia’s Custom House. Baxter suspended work on his panoramas to volunteer for the military at the outbreak of the Civil War. He raised a regiment known as Baxter’s Fire Zouaves recruited from the city’s numerous fire companies and soon thereafter authoredThe Vol - unteer’s Manual, a booklet instructing recruits in marching and weapons handling, published by King & Baird, who also published his panoramas. In 1863 Baxter patented a modification to the standard knapsack carried by Union soldiers, and he may have outfitted his regiment with this knapsack at his own expense. Baxter sustained a serious wound at the Battle of

The Baxter Panoramic Business Directory, Arch St. South Side from 8th to 9th (Philadelphia: A. C. Weaever & Co., February 1880). Gift of Clarence Wolf.

70 the Wilderness in Virginia in May 1864 and was mustered out along with his regiment in August of that year. Baxter’s motivation to resume his panorama project after an almost two-decade hiatus seems to have been the shift from residential to commercial use of buildings in Center City and the city’s relentless westward growth. Baxter cited Chestnut, Eighth, Ninth, Arch, Race, Spring Gar- den, Girard, and Ridge as streets transformed by these changes to the urban fabric. He planned to produce one thousand copies of views of one hundred twenty-five city blocks with the eventual plan of issuing all the plates in book form. The guidelines delineated in his original prospectus required that for a block to be included at least eight resident businesses had to subscribe to the view. The subscribers would in return have their names represented on their business façades and be given space at the bottom for an advertisement. In the Baxter view reproduced here nine businesses, including two photographers, a lithographic printer, and a candy store have become subscribers. The advertisement for V. Quarre Co.’s lithographic shop provided the company’s founding date, a fact not known by us until we received this gift and a welcome addition to our biographical dictionary of Philadelphia lithographers. For this later phase of his project, Baxter worked with publishers A. C. Weaver & Co., rather than King & Baird, and produced thirty-six panoramas. The last panorama was issued in April 1880, about a year before his death. Baxter planned to provide copies of his panoramic directories to “all public and many private libraries throughout the country” as well as giving a complete set to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Bax- ter, however, does not seem to have given a set to the Library Company. Other than this recent gift from Mr. Wolf, all of the Baxter panoramas in our collection came to us from John A. McAllister.

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As America looked forward to celebrating its 100th anniversary in 1876, savvy entrepreneurs saw opportunities to capitalize on the public’s interest in the past and the spreading patriotic fervor. Advertisers linked products as diverse as life insurance and spices to the Centennial celebration. Makers of bunting and flags offered specially designed patriotic

71 Centennial decorations for residential and business interiors and exteri- ors. This year with the aid of the Donald Cresswell Fund we purchased an advertisement issued by Cunningham and Hill of Philadelphia urging

Centennial America (Boston, Mass.: Armstrong & Co., 1875). Lithotint. Gift of David Doret.

72 residents who planned to buy decorations for their homes “to do so at their earliest convenience to avoid a rush which will be inevitable.” The Centennial Exposition, the six-month fair held in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, spawned a plethora of images. Named the official fair photographers, the Centennial Photographic Company produced more than three thousand images of the buildings, exhibitions, and grounds, which ranged in size from small stereographs to seventeen by twenty- one inch prints. Large lithographic prints of the buildings and grounds suitable for framing and display rolled off the presses, and illustrated periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper kept readers apprised of activities at the fair through articles and images. The Main Building at the Centennial Exposition was given a prominent place in the grand sweep of America’s four-hundred-year history as portrayed in the lithotint Centennial America, given to us by shareholder David Doret and illustrated here. As might be expected in a lithograph produced by a Boston-based firm, that city plays a dominant role in the narrative, with vignettes illustrating the Boston Tea Party, Faneuil Hall, and the battles at both Bunker Hill and Lexington. Portraits of all the presidents, Christopher Columbus, and Amerigo Vespucci; the Capitol building in Washington; and George Washington relics are also illustrated. Philadelphia’s importance is acknowledged with images of Frank- lin’s printing press, the Liberty Bell, Congress Hall, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The country’s 19th-century history is largely ignored; no reference is made to the American Civil War. Internal strife apparently did not have a place in the feel-good sweep of this print’s narrative history in which the entire country joined together to defeat a common enemy, Great Britain, and in the process created an enduring new system of government. The Centennial was a time to celebrate, not analyze, the past. Sarah J. Weatherwax Curator of Prints and Photographs

73 Service and Administration As 2011 began, the exhibition “Building a City of the Dead: The Creation and Expansion of Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery” was on view in the Louise Lux-Sions and Harry Sions Gallery. This exhibition, mounted on the 175th anniversary of Laurel Hill by the Library Com- pany and the Friends of Laurel Hill Cemetery, opened in November of 2010 and was curated by University of Pennsylvania Historic Preserva- tion faculty member Aaron Wunsch. Drawing on the archives of both institutions, the exhibition examined the history of Philadelphia’s first “rural” cemetery and explored 19th-century urbanites’ romantic sensi- bilities and quest for postmortem permanence by shifting the locus of burial to the countryside. Lenders to the exhibition included half a dozen institutions and descendants of John Jay Smith, a long-serving Library Company Librarian and a Laurel Hill founder. Library Company Trustee and great Friend of Laurel Hill Richard Wood Snowden provided major support for the project. In conjunction with the exhibition Dr. Wunsch organized a conference on “Revisiting Rural Cemeteries.” The online exhibition can be found at www.librarycompany.org/laurelhill/index.htm. On May 17 the Library Company opened “John A. McAllis- ter’s Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front,” which was supported by grants from the Independence Foundation, the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Curated by long-time Library Company Curator of African American History Phil Lapsan- sky, the exhibition highlighted the immense wealth of print and graphic ephemera donated to the Library Company by one of the 19th century’s most extraordinary collectors. Decades ahead of his time in his attention to everyday printed matter, McAllister collected indefatigably, drawing to himself all manner of social, cultural, and political ephemera in the time before and during the Civil War. Learning of his interests, other collectors throughout the North supplied McAllister with material, and soldiers in the field even sent him Confederate ephemera. Beginning in 2006, Library Company staff disassembled the deteriorating scrapbooks that had housed most of McAllister’s collection, cataloged the items indi- vidually, and created an online database and finding aids, making the collection much more accessible to researchers. The exhibition made use of

74 the McAllister material to offer glimpses into military recruitment; activ- ism by African Americans; political campaigns; troop transport; medical treatment; balls, benefits, theaters, and social life; and the great variety of civic associational activity—including the Union League, the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, and the Sanitary Commission and Great Central Fair—in support of (and sometimes in opposition to) the Union cause. The exhibition, originally scheduled to run through De- cember 9, was extended for another week to finish the exhibition year in the main gallery. The online exhibition can be found at www.librarycompany.org/mcallisterexhibition. Last year was a dynamic one with respect to the “mini” exhibitions mounted in the four cases that flank the main entrance to the Reading Room. Smaller exhibitions included a two-case look at mourning literature curated by Chief of Reference Cornelia King and displayed from October 2010 through March 2011. Images of cross-dressing from the Civil War were displayed from May through December (in conjunction with artist-in-residence Jennifer Levonian’s video project “Rebellious Bird,” described below and on view from May through September). A small exhibition of documents relating to the American career of Luther- an pastor and institution-builder Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was guest curated by Wolfgang Splitter, a research associate at the Halle-Witten- berg Center for United States Studies in Germany who also presented a related lecture in October. Finally, in October, two cases were devoted to the “Art of the Library Company,” in which recent art works in a variety of media by six current staff members were paired with the sources of their inspiration in the collections—from an elaborate mother-of-pearl binding, to a broadside with a curious advertisement for the “Dance of the Six Dinner Plates,” to a tiny paper love token found tucked in the pages of a bible. As for events at the Library Company last year, each of our now three topical programs organized thematic offerings. In April the Program in Early American Economy and Society held a half-day conference exploring a new book by Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1765. PEAES later in the year paired with the McNeil Center for Early Ameri- can Studies of the University of Pennsylvania to present a major confer-

75 ence on “Ireland, America, and the Worlds of Mathew Carey.” A month later a second, transatlantic, installment of the same conference convened at Trinity College in Dublin. Lest any of our shareholders think we have not fully embraced the social networking media of the times, I am pleased to inform them that conference participants “tweeted” their observations with an identifying “hashtag.” The Program in African American History, benefitting from the final year of a pilot grant from the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, continued to welcome a vibrant community of scholars to the Library Com- pany to research our historical collections. Special events included a talk for the Junto in December by Curator Phil Lapsansky reflecting on over forty years of collecting African Americana, and a commemoration (co- sponsored by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Robin’s Books) of the 100th anniversary of the death of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of the best known African American poets of the 19th century and a staunch abolitionist. Additional programming focused on topics in early African American History such as a summer seminar on abolitionism for secondary school teachers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and led by Professor Richard Newman of the Rochester In- stitute of Technology, and the featured talk at the 2011 Annual Dinner by David S. Reynolds, author of Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America. The Visual Culture Program sponsored a public program on early daguerreotypes by former Helfand Fellow Sarah Kate Gillespie. The Program also made important graphics acquisitions in 2011 with an endowment that owes heavily to the contributions of shareholder Donald Cresswell. In May, the Program hosted a reception for artist Jennifer Le- vonian, who collaborated with the Library Company to create an animated video about women who disguised themselves as men and fought as soldiers during the Civil War. In addition to learning about Levonian’s artistic process, attendees were treated to a talk by Wendy Ramsburg, a Civil War reenactor who plays the part of a cross-dressing soldier.

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76 Other 2011 programs and activities not already mentioned included: w A program on “Benjamin Bradley and the Art of Manufacturing Publishers’ Cloth Bindings” given by collector Todd Pattison and co-sponsored by the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers. w A presentation by Daniel K. Richter, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, on his most recent work, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts. w An illustrated lecture about the work of artist James Peale given by Dr. Carol E. Soltis, Library Company Trustee and Associate Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, inspired by the Library Company’s acquisition of the Peale portraits of Zachariah and Susannah Knorr Poulson.

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Our research fellowship program, now in its twenty-fifth year, continues to flourish and has grown to such a degree that last year we awarded almost $160,000 in stipends to more than three dozen fellows. These funds came from several sources: restricted endowments; renewable grants, such as the generous support we receive from the National Endowment for the Humanities for post-doctoral fellowships; and annual gifts that support work in particular fields, such as the Reese Company Fellowship in bibliography and the Helfand Fellowships, one in the history of medicine and one in visual culture. In 2011 we completed the third year of a program of fellowships in Early American Literature and Material Texts in collaboration with our friends at the McNeil Center, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Our list of former fellows now numbers almost six hundred and fifty, and the list of books they have published nearly two hundred.

77 For the 2011–2012 academic year the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania jointly awarded nineteen one- month fellowships to support research in American history and culture.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellows were: w Dr. Tyler Boulware, Department of History, West Virginia Uni- versity; Next to Kin: Native Americans and Friendship in Early America w Jacob Crane, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Tufts University; Barbary(an) Invasions w Trenton Jones, Ph.D. Candidate in History, The Johns Hopkins University; “Deprived of Their Liberty”: Prisoners of War and Revolu- tionary American Military Culture w Stephanie Koscak, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Indiana Univer- sity; Multiplying Pictures for the Public: Reproducing the English Monar- chy, ca.1648–1780 w Timothy Lombardo, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Purdue Uni- versity; The Development of Blue-Collar Conservatism in Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia w Dr. Lucia McMahon, Department of History, William Paterson University; Life Lessons: A Cultural History of Female Biography in Nineteenth-Century America w Dr. Erin Murphy, Department of Sociology and Criminal Jus- tice, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville; Herbert Welsh and the Anti-Imperialist Investigations on “Atrocities” in the Philippines, 1899–1910 w Dr. Heather Nathans, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of Maryland; Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pa- gans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage w Dr. Richard Newman, Department of History, Rochester Insti- tute of Technology; All’s Fair: Race and Sanitary Reform in the Civil War Era w Dr. David Prior, Department of History, University of South Carolina; Paul Du Chaillu, the Exploration of Equatorial West Africa, and the Politics of Race in the Civil War-Era United States

78 w Dr. Adam Shapiro, Department of Medical History and Bioeth- ics, University of Wisconsin-Madison; William Paley and the Natu- ral Theology Tradition in America w Mary Catherine Wood, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, Uni- versity of Delaware; Benjamin West’s Nelson Memorial: Neoclassical Sculpture and the Atlantic World ca. 1812 w Nicholas Wood, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Vir- ginia; Questions of Humanity and Expediency: The Slave Trades and African Colonization in the Early American Republic w Benjamin Wright, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Rice University; Early American Clergy and the Transformation of Antislavery: From the Politics of Conversion to the Conversion to Politics, 1770–1830

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Fellows were: w Paul Polgar, Ph.D. Candidate in History, The City University of New York Graduate Center; To Be Free and Equal? Antislavery Re- form in America, 1783-1833 w Dr. Ashli White, Department of History, University of Miami; Object Lessons of the Revolutionary Atlantic

The Barra Foundation International Fellows were: w Dr. David Lambert, Department of History, University of War- wick, UK; Mobility, Race and Power in the Caribbean, ca.1780–ca.1880 w Dr. Gesa Mackenthun, Department of American Studies, Ros- tock University, Germany; Mesoamerican Antiquities and the Trans- national Birth of Archaeology

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania McFarland Fellow was: w Dr. James Gigantino, Department of History, University of Ar- kansas; Freedom and Slavery in the Garden of America: African Ameri- cans and Abolition in New Jersey, 1775–1861

79 The Library Company independently awarded an additional fourteen fellowships, ranging from one to four-and-one-half months. The National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellows were: w Dr. Edward Cahill, Department of English, Fordham Univer- sity; Colonial Rising: Narratives of Upward Mobility in British America w Dr. Marcy Dinius, Department of English, University of Dela- ware; Radical African American Print Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries w Dr. Nancy Hagedorn, Department of History, State University of New York at Fredonia; On the Waterfrontier: Atlantic Port City Waterfronts as Zones of Cultural Interaction, 1700–1825

The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Dissertation Fellows were: w Jennifer Heil, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Emory University; The American Columbus: Chronology, Geography, and the Historical Imagina- tion in Nineteenth-Century Literature w Thomas LeCarner, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of Colorado; The Empathic Response: Narratives of Forgiveness in Ameri- can Law, Literature, and Culture

The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Fellows in African American History were: w Dr. David Crosby, Independent Scholar, Jackson, Mississippi; An Annotated Critical Edition of Anthony Benezet’s Antislavery Writings w Aston Gonzales, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Michigan; Black Activist Art in Philadelphia, 1820–1860 w Lori Leavell, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Emory University; Imagining a Future South: David Walker’s Appeal and Antebellum American Literature w Anna Stewart, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of Texas at Austin; Lives Reconstructed: Slave Narratives and Freedmen’s Educa- tion

80 The McLean Contributionship Fellow was: w Sarah Chesney, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, William and Mary; The Flowering Web: Tracing William Hamilton’s Botanical Net- work in Late-18th- and Early-19th-Century Philadelphia

The Reese Fellow in American Bibliography was: w Kristen Highland, Ph.D. Candidate in English, New York Uni- versity; “A Great Emporium”: The Book Store and the Cultural Geogra- phy of Antebellum New York City

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellow was: w Dr. Cynthia Bouton, Department of History, Texas A&M University; Subsistence, Society, and Culture in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century and Age of Revolution

The William H. Helfand Fellow in Early American Medicine, Science, and Society was: w Susan Brandt, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Temple University; Gifted Women and Skilled Practitioners: Gender and Healing Authority in the Mid-Atlantic Region, 1740–1830

The William H. Helfand Fellow in the Program in Early American Visual Culture was w Catherine Walsh, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, University of Delaware; Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Orality in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture

The Library Company’s Program in Early American Economy and Society

The Dissertation Fellows were: w Dr. Joseph Adelman, Department of History, The Johns Hop- kins University; Revolutionary Networks: The Business of Printing and the Production of American Politics, 1763–1789

81 w Dr. Martin Ohman, Department of History, University of Vir- ginia; Pursuits of Union: American Political Economy, Federal Politics, and Internal Divisions, 1783–1821

The Long-Term Fellows were: w Andrew Fagel, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Binghamton Univer- sity; To ‘Provide for the Common Defense’: The Political Economy of War in the Early American Republic, 1789–1818 w Dael Norwood, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Princeton Univer- sity; Trading in Liberty: The Politics of the American China Trade, ca. 1784–1862 w Edward Pompeian, Ph.D. Candidate in History, The College of William and Mary; Spirited Enterprises: The United States, Venezuela, and the Independence of Latin America, 1790–1823 w Danielle Skeehan, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Northeastern University, Counterfeit Subjects: Credit, Commerce, and the Generation of Atlantic World Counterpublics

The Short-Term Fellows were: w Hannah Farber, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley; The Insurance Industry in the Early Republic w Frances Kolb, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Vanderbilt University; Contesting Borderlands: Commerce and Settlement in the Lower Missis- sippi Valley, 1765–1800 w Colleen Rafferty, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Delaware; “To Establish an Intercourse Between our Respective Houses”: Economic Networks in the Mid-Atlantic, 1735–1815 w Steven Smith, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Mis- souri; A World the Printers Made: Print Culture in New York, 1730– 1830

w w w

82 The Library Company/McNeil Center for Early American Studies Dissertation Fellows in Early American Literature and Material Texts

w Mark Mattes, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies, University of Iowa; Material Letters: Media History and the Politics of Epistolary Practice, 1780–1845 w Seth Perry, Ph.D. Candidate in Divinity, University of Chicago; “A Valuable Book”: Bibles and Religious Authority in Early National America

w w w The staff of the Library Company continued to display professional- ism and passion as they tirelessly advanced the cause of this venerable organization both within our walls and as advocates at conferences and events across the country. For many departments 2011 was consumed by work on a project to catalog ephemera in the Library Company’s collections, which was generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Library Company has been collecting ephemera— commonplace items that are so often disposed of rather than being left to posterity—since 1785. The grant provided funds to catalog more than ninety individual collections of ephemera over the course of two years. Last year saw a great deal of that effort completed, with enthusiastic contributions from the staff in the Reading Room, the Print Department, and the Cataloging Department. In May Molly Roth joined the Library Company as Development Director charged with helping to grow membership and annual support in addition to raising funds for major capital needs. Dr. Roth comes to the Library Company from a career in fundraising, nonprofit management, and governance that spans twenty-five years and has included positions with the San Francisco Opera Association, the University of Pennsylvania, and Opportunities Industrialization Centers Internation- al, Inc. Dr. Roth instituted new record-keeping systems and conducted a successful annual fund in 2011, in addition to taking on responsibili- ties for communications, marketing, and helping to support the work of

83 the Board. At the very end of the year, Dr. Roth was joined by Daniel Nelson as Development and Membership Coordinator. Dr. Nelson, who had experience at several university libraries including the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, had also assisted with membership efforts for the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. Dr. Nelson is rapidly acquainting himself with the Library Company’s wonderful members and is always available to provide information or offer assistance. Librarian Jim Green continued his substantial contributions to the field of American publishing history. He contributed a chapter on “Hand Coloring vs. Color Printing in Early Nineteenth-Century Natural His- tory Color-Plate Books,” in the new anthology Knowing Nature: Art & Science in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840, edited by Amy Meyers. In addition, he taught week-long classes at the Rare Book School at the Univer- sity of Virginia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Mr. Green additionally taught a semester-long seminar on the History of the Book in the Book Arts MFA program at the University of the Arts. Curator of Printed Books Rachel D’Agostino made a presentation entitled “Sensational American Book Bindings in the Library Company of Philadelphia: Bearing Witness to the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age” at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. In addition, Ms. D’Agostino attended a course at the Rare Book School and chaired a panel at a conference of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. Ms. D’Agostino received significant assistance in 2011 from volunteer Ann Nista, an experienced library professional in her own right, in the ongoing work of processing new gifts of material and reorganizing areas of the stacks. In 2011 Curator of African American History Phil Lapsansky ad- vised a number of fellows on their work with the collections. Mr. Lapsan- sky’s major contribution was curating the exhibition “John A. McAllis- ter’s Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front,” which ran from April through December. As part of his tour of curatorial duty, Mr. Lapsansky also gave the 2011 Junto talk on the topic of his forty years of work as a book collector and curator at the Library Company. In addition, Mr. Lapsansky coordinated events with the Moonstone Arts Center and act- ed as an ad hoc media spokesperson for the collections he has presided

84 over in the course of an illustrious and significant career. Last year was Mr. Lapsansky’s final full year with the Library Company. He looks forward to celebrating his retirement in 2012. The main Reading Room served 1,887 readers, in the process providing 4,433 books, supplying 909 photocopies, answering 876 e-mail inquiries, and responding to 727 phone inquiries. Chief of Reference Cornelia S. King also supervised Haverford College intern Elizabeth Crooks in a summer project to catalog and digitize items in the Teitel- man Collection of American Sunday-School Union Woodblocks and Imprints. With additional help from Nicole Joniec and Digitization Technician Concetta Barbara, Ms. Crooks was able to make images of selected blocks and printed pages accessible in ImPAC. Reference Librarian Linda August represented the Library Company at meetings of the Delaware Valley Registrars’ Network; created hundreds of individual catalog records; and oversaw completion of the Art & Artifacts Collec- tion project, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, that enabled us to conserve and digitize many of the paintings and objects in our care. Reference Assistant Edith Mulhern created more than 3,000 digital images for the ephemera cataloging project. In addition, she cataloged numerous records of the comic valentine collection, which came to the Library Company from Trustee William Helfand. Ms. Mulhern also assisted Phil Lapsansky with translations from the French of several Haiti-related items. Volunteer Janet Hallahan worked on biographical profiles of former Library Company shareholders. The staff of the Print Department assisted 268 readers in its reading room, and paged 3,497 items in the process. The Rights & Reproductions service filled 312 orders, providing 1,118 images needed for books, articles, films, lectures, exhibitions, and other uses. In addition, department staff also created 1,973 catalog records describing 7,947 items. Curator of Prints & Photographs Sarah Weatherwax contributed an article to the spring issue of Imprint on “James M. Vickroy: Publishing Certificates for America.” Ms. Weatherwax also developed a web exhibition celebrating the Print Department’s fortieth anniversary and attended conferences in both Philadelphia and Baton Rouge. With Linda August, Ms. Weather- wax co-curated a mini exhibition to accompany artist-in-residence Jen- nifer Levonian’s animated video that explored the topic of women in the

85 Civil War who disguised themselves as men and fought as soldiers. Asso- ciate Curator of Prints & Photographs Erika Piola presented three conference papers and published an essay on the McAllister Civil War Enve- lope Collection in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. She also attended the Print Council of America Annual Meeting. Project Assistant Linda Wisniewski completed nearly 1,500 catalog records for more than 3,000 items of ephemera. Print Department Assistant & Digital Collections Manager Nicole Joniec attended conferences and workshops on digital technologies, including digital preservation and digital archives, and received technical training on digitization software. The Print Department continued to benefit from the dedicated support of volunteers Louise Beardwood, Ann Condon, and Brett Tobias. It was with regret that the Library Com- pany bid farewell to Ms. Condon, who has been volunteering at this institution since 1998. Information Technology Manager Nicole Scalessa attended the conferences of Computers in Libraries, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. In addition, Ms. Scalessa became the As- sociate Director of the newly-formed Historians Against Slavery, which had its first meeting at the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic in July. The Cataloging Department cataloged more than 4,000 items in 2011. This includes ephemera project items as well as rare books and se- rials. The department successfully wrapped up the Library Company’s first large-scale digitization project, focused on Early American imprints, with the Readex Company. Chief Cataloger Ruth Hughes represented the Library Company at the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries and attended American Library Association conferences in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and San Diego. Rare Book Cata- loger Holly Phelps devoted her energies this year to cataloging ephemera. In addition, she attended a Resource Description and Access seminar; a digital-mapping workshop on “Putting Maps to Work”; and a conference on “Exploring Maps: History, Fabrication, and Preservation.” The Cataloging Department was thrilled to hire Cataloging Assistant Arielle Middleman in 2011. Ms. Middleman joined the Library Company after studying at Bennington College and cataloging for the Philadelphia

86 Museum of Art. During her time at the Library Company in 2011 Ms. Middleman upgraded 7,000 catalog records. The Conservation Department treated 525 items this year, in addition to installing one major and several smaller exhibitions. Chief of Conservation Jennifer Rosner and Conservator Alice Austin were active in the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers—Ms. Ros- ner as President and Ms. Austin as Secretary/Treasurer and also as Exhi- bition Chair. In addition to the talk co-sponsored by the Library Com- pany and the Guild mentioned above, the Library Company hosted two Guild workshops: “Wire-edge Binding Structure” with Graham Watson and “Large Pages into Small Spaces: Folding Paper to Fit into a Binding Structure.” Ms. Rosner attended the annual conference of the American Institute of Conservation held in Philadelphia, and she and Conservator Andrea Krupp attended the Guild of Book Workers Standards Seminar in Boston. The Bibliographical Society of America awarded Ms. Krupp the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize in American Bibliography for her work on 19th-century cloth-case bindings, and Ms. Krupp was also a speaker at a summer Rare Book School course. Publicity, Events, and Program Coordinator Lauren Propst processed more than 200 fellowship applications, produced seven e-newsletters, and coordinated twelve events including the Annual Meeting, Annual Dinner and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Semi- nar for School Teachers. Chief of Maintenance & Security Al Dallasta and Maintenance As- sistant Bernard Phillips had a busy and laborious year, during which we installed a new boiler system and took possession of the building we acquired in late 2010. Thanks to their efforts, our costs to provide the cli- matic conditions needed by our collections and users have come down and we are poised to increase our space for collections and programs. The daily efforts of Mr. Dallasta and Mr. Phillips are often invisible to our many patrons, but without their work the smooth operation of the Library Company would be impossible. Receptionist Charlene Knight continued to offer expert guidance and time-tested calm to each visitor to the Library no matter how obtuse or frenzied the request.

John C. Van Horne The Edwin Wolf 2nd Director

87 Appreciation During 2011, the Library Company received—and acknowledges with gratitude—many contributions in the form of materials for the permanent collections, annual dues for operations, and grants and gifts for endowment, programs, and special projects, some of which are listed here.

GIFTS OF $1,000,000 AND ABOVE Anonymous

GIFTS OF $500,000 AND ABOVE Anonymous Mr. and Mrs. H. F. Lenfest

GIFTS OF $100,000 AND ABOVE Mrs. Benjamin Coates and Theodate Coates The McLean Contributionship National Endowment for the Humanities The Scheide Fund Clarence Wolf

GIFTS OF $50,000 AND ABOVE The Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Martha Hamilton Morris (Cotswold Foundation)

GIFTS OF $25,000 AND ABOVE Davida T. Deutsch

GIFTS OF $10,000 AND ABOVE Peter A. Benoliel and Willo Carey Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Mr. and Mrs. B. Robert DeMento Estate of Oliver M. Ford John Otto and Janet Haas William H. Helfand Mrs. William L. McLean III Howell K. Rosenberg Richard Wood Snowden Helen S. Weary

88 GIFTS OF $5,000 AND ABOVE

The Barra Foundation Beatrice W. B. Garvan Haney Foundation Trust Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer and Joseph Neubauer Elizabeth Lippincott Louise Lippincott Walter J. Miller Trust Mr. and Mrs. Edward A. Montgomery, Jr. The Philadelphia Cultural Fund Charles E. Rosenberg and Drew Gilpin Faust Thomas O. Stanley

GIFTS OF $2,500 AND ABOVE Robert J. Christian William Reese Maude de Schauensee John and Christine Van Horne Anthony N. B. Garvan, Jr. Michael Zinman Charles B. Landreth GIFTS OF $1,000 AND ABOVE Thomas and Mary Barbera David W. and Catharine E. Maxey Mrs. Joseph T. Beardwood III Collin F. McNeil Bailey Bishop John F. Meigs Harry S. Cherken, Jr. Stanley Merves Nicholas D. Constan Carol S. Rush Dry Family Foundation Mary Coxe Schlosser Jonathan Friedmann Carol Eaton and Charles W. Soltis Peter O. Gante Boyd Lee Spahr Joel Gardner and Holly Phelps Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum Mr. and Mrs. Roger S. Hillas John C. Tuten Janet and Lewis Klein Ignatius and Trudy Wang Carol J. and Richard W. Lang Stephanie G. and Albert E. Wolf Gordon and Louise Marshall GIFTS OF $500 AND ABOVE Mark Randolph Ashton Ed Lee and Jean Campe Foundation Patricia Wenrich Barnes Judith Freyer Mark C. Bartlett Elizabeth H. Gemmill Mary Ivy Bayard Autumn Adkins Graves Carmen P. Belefonte James Green and Rosalind Remer Michael Brown Gail Harrity Paul K. Bunting Frank L. Hohmann III Ronald Chan Ralph Kendricks Robert R. Chew Robert W. Kennedy Donald H. Cresswell David A. Kimball

89 Sidney Lapidus Elizabeth Lea Oliver David M. Lesser Richard W. Pascal Mr. and Mrs. Howard H. Lewis Steven J. Peitzman Jean Bronson Mahoney Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Rappaport Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Mather III Daniel K. Richter Mark Meigs Dr. and Mrs. Karl F. Rugart Leonard L. Milberg Wilson L. Smith Randall M. Miller Joyce B. Storey John M. Murrin Mark D. Tomasko Mrs. Milo M. Naeve Neale Wheeler Watson Charles H. Ness Thomas L. Williams GIFTS OF $200 AND ABOVE Howard A. Aaronson J. Morris Evans J. L. Alarcon Donald Farren Barbara A. Almquist Florence Fearrington W. Graham Arader Joseph J. Felcone Pierce Archer Steve Finer Joseph F. Baker and William S. Mulherin Kenneth Finkel Ben and Carol Baldridge Tranda S. Fischelis Nancy Sadler Baldwin Eugene S. Flamm Catherine Barnes Mr. and Mrs. William W. Fox Lisa Unger Baskin Robert J. Gill David and Natalie Bauman Charles C. Gillispie Ricardo Ben-Safed Louis M. Golden Thomas Peter Bennett Wanda S. Gunning Cordelia Frances Biddle Stephen G. Hague and Laura Keim John Bidwell Michael Hairston Robert M. Bird Mr. and Mrs. Michael P. Halpert Eugene and Joann Bissell Portia Hamilton Sperr Michael Carasik and Jan Bruckner Jerome Handler Ann M. and William B. Carey Conrad K. Harper Susan W. and Cummins Catherwood, Jr. Kathryn Heisinger John S. Child, Jr. Mrs. J. Welles Henderson G. Scott Clemons James Hill Ann Condon Hollie P. Holt Robert H. Cresswell Mathew Carey Hudson Charles Davidson Penelope McCaskill Hunt Timothy Davidson Bruce and Nora James Allen F. Davis Daniel W. Johnson Charles H. Davis Edward J. Kane Andrew Imbrie Dayton Stanley N. Katz Robert W. DeCoursey Cornelia S. King Thomas M. Doerflinger Susan E. Klepp Edward C. Driscoll Sue Kozel Richard S. and Mary Maples Dunn Harold Kyriakodis Benjamin Eisner Linda F. and Julian L. Lapides

90 Julia Bissell Leisenring Molly Roth Michael Leja Daniel Rottenberg Charles Letocha David B. Rowland Joseph W. Lippincott III Caroline F. Schimmel Patricia T. McCurdy Robert W. and Kate Royer Schubert James MacElderry and Marilyn Fishman Paul M. Schyve Estherann McFarland Jonathan D. Scott Anita K. McKelvey Mary Elizabeth Scott Bruce McKittrick and Wendy Wilson John H. Serembus Donald and Ann McPhail Elisabeth Shellenberger Mr. and Mrs. Howard Magen Jeanne Sigler Bruce H. Mann Margot C. Sklar Sandra Markham Ronald K. Smeltzer Norma Martin Milner Peter Stallybrass Roger W. Moss David M. Stewart Sanford K. Mozes Winston Tabb Carla Mulford Josephine J. Templeton Mr. and Mrs. Britton H. Murdoch Andrew S. Terhune Robert J. Murphy, Jr. Seymour I. Toll Gary B. Nash J. Thomas Touchton Karen L. Nathan Andrew J. Trevelise Donald Neiman Aron D. Wahrman Arthur E. Newbold Anne Wetzel Charles W. Nichols Thomas M. Whitehead Irene C. Park David H. Wice Robert and Alison Petrilla William Williams Gordon A. Pfeiffer Jean K. Wolf David N. Redden Denis B. Woodfield Donald H. Roberts Peter Zinman GIFTS OF $100 AND ABOVE George Ahern Joseph and Nancy Benford Margaret Allen James M. Bergquist George M. Aman Catherine C. Blecki Thomas Sayre Ambler Veachey R. Bloom Gerald A. Anderson Hester Blum Mr. and Mrs. Ronald C. Anderson Wayne Bodle Dee E. Andrews George W. Boudreau Nick Aretakis Nathaniel R. Bowditch Anna Lou Ashby Ian Brabner Jonathan Auerbach Susan Branson Herman Baron Matthew P. Brown Edward P. Barranco Kerry L. Bryan Nicholas A. Basbanes Brian Burke Roger S. Baskes Sandra Cadwalader Terry Belanger Lucy E. Carroll Jean Wyeth Bell Louise W. Carter

91 Richard Carter Mina Greenstein Lilian S. L. Chance Larry and Pearl Grika Stephen P. Chawaga Janet H. Guth Beatrice L. Child Gary Hack Jonathan M. Chu Melissa J. Hancock Dr. and Mrs. James B. Congdon H. Deforest Hardinge Tina L. Coplan Kevin J. Hayes Gary Cox Joseph Heenan James D. Crawford Nancy Heinzen Jonathan T. Cresswell John Hellebrand Mr. and Mrs. John R. Curtis, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Helm John C. Dann Myrl Hermann David Library of the American Revolution Angela P. Hewett Wyatt H. Day Joel Hirsh and Toby Gang Willard and Susan Detweiler Francis W. Hoeber Richard Renato Paul Di Stefano Carol Hoffman Albert L. Doering Leroy T. Hopkins David M. Doret Thomas Horrocks James Claypoole Dorsey Norman and Joan Hubbard Katharine Sutro Dougherty Charles J. Ingersoll II Murray Dubin Charles Isaacs Peggy Duckett Herbert A. Johnson Cynthia J. Eiseman John J. Jordan Dr. and Mrs. Julius Ellison William J. D. Jordan Paul Erickson Ivan J. Jurin Robert Eskind Randi Kamine Leonard Evelev Samuel P. Katz Jean Farnsworth Thomas E. Kinsella Samuel Feinberg Gary Reed Kline Morris Finkel Phyllis Wolfgang Knoblauch Sandra Fiore Lena Anne Korey Angela Fitzgerald Michael J. Krasulski Neil K. Fitzgerald Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Ladner Ileen M. Forcine Denise M. Larrabee Lee W. Formwalt John Lauritz Larson Kathleen A. Foster Mark Samuels Lasner Edward D. Frank and Susan G. Lea Sherry Leventhal George W. Franz Lisa Linder Mr. and Mrs. John Freas Nina Long C. Stanley Freed Robert Alan Lukens Samuel M. Freeman II Stephen M. Lynch Jerry W. Frost David McCarthy François Furstenberg Katharine Vaux McCauley David A. Gallagher John J. McCusker Susan Glassman Roderick A. and Michelle Craig McDonald Henry Glick Elizabeth Ray McLean Lewis H. Gold Sandra L. McLean Francis R. Grebe Henry J. Magaziner

92 H. Craig Mann Frederick Shapiro Stephen C. Massey Jack Shapiro Charles O. Meyers Marciarose Shestack Stephen Mihm Elke Shihadeh Gary Milan Mr. and Mrs. John A. Simkiss, Jr. L. Martin Miller Pamela Sinkler-Todd Richard P. Morgan Albert H. Small Donald Mott Carl Smith Mrs. John B. Leake Arthur R. G. Solmssen Kathleen Mulhern Donald K. Sorber Hyman Myers Daniel M. Sossaman Theodore T. Newbold Karl H. Spaeth Richard S. Newman Carol Spawn Thomas S. Nicely Gus Spector Carl E. Nittinger Marianne Drott Squyres Mary Ivy Noone James B. Stewart William Nutting Page Talbott Barbara B. Oberg Maria M. Thompson Samuel Otter Richard Tyler Zoe Pappas Dell Upton Thomas V. Pastorius John R. Urofsky Michael Paul Carmen D. Valentino Robert G. Peck Elizabeth E. R. and Duncan Van Dusen Alison Perelman Arthur C. Van Horne, Jr. Jon Randall Plummer R. Neil Vance Janet Greenstein Potter Robert Venturi Daniel S. Prince Mary H. Watkins Alfred W. Putnam, Jr. Emma S. Weigley Albert J. Raman Allen Weinberg Judith Ramirez Elaine Weischedel William N. Roark Lewis A. Wexler Andrew Roberts W. Beaumont Whitney Linda E. Robertson John M. Wickersham Terence C. Roper Andrew M. Wilson David P. Roselle Milton A. and Joan Wohl Harry Rosenthal Caryl L. Wolf Diane Rossheim Richard J. Wolfe Steven Rothman Richard Wolgin Lori and Stuart Scherr John Marshall Woodruff Janice G. Schimmelman Harrison M. Wright Mr. and Mrs. Harold Schwartz Larzer Ziff Marie D. Schwarz Michael Zuckerman Charlotte B. Shapiro

93 GIFTS IN KIND 2011

George R. Allen Elizabeth P. McLean Alice Austin Estate of Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Steve Beare Gary Milan Ricardo Ben-Safed Richard Morgan Michael Brown Howard Mott Karen Christie Grace Mullen (Westminster Theological Christie’s Seminar Library) Comcast Corporation Hyman and Sandra K. Myers Charles Davis National Constitution Center Davida Deutsch Sandy and John J. Nesbitt III David M. Doret Ann Nista Katherine Drake William Nutting Mary Maples Dunn William O’Keefe Jim and Nathalie Dyen Todd and Sharon Pattison Ray Edwards Philadelphia Museum of Art Elizabeth Elmore Marshall Potamkin (in memory of Vivian Joseph J. Felcone Potamkin Neil K. Fitzgerald Steven Pouls Stephanie Gaub (Orange County Regional Charles E. Rosenberg History Center) Ruth Segal James Green John Serembus Grolier Club Walter E. Smith Jane Hastings Sotheby’s William H. Helfand Darwin H. Stapleton Caroline Helmuth Jay Robert Stiefel Mark Hofflund Roger Stoddard Raymond Holstein Alice Lea Tasman Dana D. Howe Daniel Traister Cornelia S. King John C. Van Horne Andrea Krupp Margie Warren Thomas V. Lange Sarah Weatherwax Carolyn Lea Milton and Joan Wohl Susan G. Lea Clarence Wolf Keith Lockhart Richard Wolfe Sandra Markham Wendy Woloson Gordon and Louise Marshall Michael Zinman

w w w

94 The James Rush Society

The members of the James Rush Society help to ensure that the invaluable historical materials in the Library Company’s care are maintained for future generations. The Society is named in honor of Dr. James Rush, whose generous bequest in 1869 included works of art, the library and papers of his father Dr. Benjamin Rush, and funds to construct a new building. The Society’s purpose is to recognize the generosity of those who have designated the Library Company as a beneficiary in their estate plans. The following members comprise the Society as of December 31, 2011.

Lisa Unger Baskin Mr. and Mrs. Edward A. Montgomery, Jr. Lois G. and Julian A. Brodsky Martha Hamilton Morris Paul K. Bunting Roger W. Moss Donald H. Cresswell Mrs. Milo M. Naeve B. Robert DeMento Mrs. A. Douglas Oliver Davida T. Deutsch Charles E. Rosenberg Robert H. Ellsworth Carol E. Soltis Beverly Warner Caplan Freeman Seymour I. Toll Beatrice W. B. Garvan J. Thomas Touchton William H. Helfand Frederic Trautmann Charles P. Keates John C. Van Horne David W. Maxey Helen S. Weary Elizabeth P. McLean

If you would like your name added to the roster of the James Rush Society, please contact the Development Office at (215) 546-3181 or [email protected].

95 The following Library Company exhibition catalogs and other publications are paperbound unless otherwise noted:

James Logan, 1674-1751, Bookman Extraordinary (1971) $15.00 Made in America, Printmaking 1760-1860 (1973) $15.00 Women 1500-1900 (1974) $10.00 The Library of James Logan, 1674-1751 (1974; cloth) $45.00 Quarter of a Millennium: The Library Company, 1731-1981 (1981) $30.00 Philadelphia ReVisions: The Print Department Collects (1983) $15.00 Germantown and the Germans (1983) $15.00 Mathew Carey, Publisher and Patriot (1985) $10.00 35 Receipts from The Larder Invaded (1986) $15.00 The Larder Invaded: Three Centuries of Philadelphia Food and Drink (1987) $17.00 The Delegates’ Library (1987) $15.00 How To Make Paste Papers (1988) $8.00 The Rittenhouse Mill and the Beginnings of Papermaking in America (1990) $15.00 From Gothic Windows to Peacocks: American Embossed Leather Bindings, $85.00 1825-1855 (1990; cloth) Anne Hampton Brewster: 19th-Century Author and “Social Outlaw” (1992) $10.00 The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America $23.50 (1994) At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin: A Brief History of the Library Company $15.00 of Philadelphia (1995) Making a Case for Cloth: Publishers’ Cloth Case Bindings, 1830-1900 (1995) $10.00 An African American Miscellany: Selections from a Quarter-Century of $15.00 Collecting, 1970-1995 (1996) The Library of William Byrd of Westover (1997; cloth) $80.00 Noteworthy Philadelphia: A City’s Musical Heritage, 1750-1915 (1997) $10.00 “A Melancholy Scene of Devastation”: The Public Response to the 1793 $40.00 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (1997; cloth) “Every Man His Own Doctor”: Popular Medicine in Early America (1998) $15.00 The Hook and The Book: The Emergence of Crochet and Knitting in American $15.00 Popular Culture, 1840-1876 (2001)

96 Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: The Photographs of William H. Rau $65.00 (2002; cloth) The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation (2002) $22.50 Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American $25.00 Industry (2003; cloth) Risky Business: Winning and Losing in the Early American Economy (2003) $15.00 From the Bottom Up: Popular Reading and Writing in the Michael Zinman $15.00 Collection of Early American Imprints (2004) America’s Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Reappraisal of John Bartram, $40.00 1699-1777 (2004; cloth) Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in $50.00 Antebellum America (2004; cloth) The Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide (2005; cloth) $56.00 The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions $25.00 (2006; cloth) Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer (2006; cloth) $50.00 The Library of Benjamin Franklin(2006; cloth) $100.00 “A Clock for the Rooms:” The Horological Legacy of the Library Company $10.00 (2006) Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic (2008) $10.00 Afro-Americana, 1553-1906. 2nd expanded edition (2008; cloth) $125.00 Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry $55.00 Virginia (2009; cloth) Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009) $25.00 Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (2010; cloth) $65.00 Philadelphia on Stone: Commercial Lithography in Philadelphia, 1828-1878 $50.00 (2012; cloth)

Many of our publications are available through our online store: www.librarycompany.org. Members receive a 20% discount.

BACK COVER: Detail from Pieter Goos, Paskaerte Van de Zuÿdt en Noordt Revier in Nieu Nederlant Streckende van Cabo Hinloopen tot Rechkewach (Amsterdam, 1666). Hand- colored engraving. The McNeil Americana Collection. Bequest of Robert L. McNeil, Jr.